I don't feel right.
It began in earnest around the time of Scott's death and has been growing rapidly worse.
Not quite depression... nor anxiety... nor boredom... nor anger...
Perhaps it's the ambiguity of the thing that makes it so troublesome.
I feel that I am not getting along with my friends as well. That I am writing less often. That I am sleeping ill. That I am not getting the proper amount of exercise. That I miss Caroline terribly.

There was a fair bit of confusion over the matter of obtaining a pumpkin this year... and, in the end, we didn't get one. I'd been pretty set on the idea of carving a jack-o-lantern. It made me pretty pissed. And then pretty depressed. And then I got over it.
Who cares.
There really isn't any sort of Halloween here, anyway. You'd expect that there would be, in a place like Santa Cruz... but there's no fun and outrageous decorating around campus, or even around town, really, and, since we don't get trick-or-treaters up here, there's no abundance of candy and costume. Indeed, I would have expected to see a great deal more people in costume around campus. There were a fair few in downtown when I went today and the businesses have a trick-or-treating event for local kids every year... but not much up here, really.

Auntie Bruna died tonight.
Mum called me earlier this evening to tell me that she was not doing well at all and had been placed under hospice care in order to have nurses available. She said one of the more experienced hospice nurses had been asked how long they thought Bruna had and that they'd replied "less than a week".
It wasn't surprising or anything. Not really. Bruna has been going downhill. She turned one hundred years old this month... and I had kind of a bad feeling about that. She was sort of isolated from the rest of the family out there at her care facility... and you could tell that she was feeling it. She had good days and bad. She would get terribly depressed, but perk right up if she received visitors.

And then she would be so terribly sad to see you go.

I felt pretty awful about saying goodbye the last time we visited her.
She clearly would have liked it if we would have stayed longer. She didn't want us to leave.
She talked like she didn't have anybody. Like nobody really cared all that much. Like she had nothing left to live for.
They were going to throw her a birthday party at the care facility. The staff had it all planned out. It seemed, to me... like a final goal.
What would she live for after her birthday party?
She didn't seem to think there was anything else.

She died rather suddenly around eleven o'clock.
Mum sent me an e-mail.
She said it was a lot faster than expected and probably due to a heart attack or something similar.

I suppose I'm not really all that sorry that she's gone. I know she's better off now, with God, in a place where she knows she's loved and wanted, in a place where nothing hurts and she doesn't have to lie in bed all day, weighed down by a heavy, failing body...
I wonder if you get to see all the people you loved who passed on after you go. I guess that'd come down to whether or not we are reincarnated after we die or to whether the relationships we make in this world really matter outside of it. Maybe, after this, the only thing that matters is God.
But if you do get to see them, then she's probably with her husband now. What was his name? Al?
If she's with him, she probably said something terribly witty when she first saw him like "All these years, you never called, you never wrote..."

Nah.
I'm not really all that sorry she's gone.
Our bodies are made for this earth... but our souls to be with God.
She's better off.
It's just... it sucks so hard for some people... the end.
Living alone like that... separated from the ones you love...
I wonder how often people visited her? How often Ginny or Debby or whoever would call?
I wonder if she managed to make any friends in that place.
To think that she came to a certain point in her life and... gave up. Said "no one cares, there's nothing left"...
Ma says there won't be a funeral. Bruna said she didn't want one because she didn't feel that she really had anybody anymore.
I mean, how fucked is that?
It makes this little dip I'm going through look like absolutely nothing!

It's depressing to think about.