The Lost Decade

This decade sucked.

Aside from the ways in which it sucked generally (y'know, 9/11, Katrina, a near-depression), it sucked for me personally. I came up with the name the Lost Decade last year, when we were evacuated for the storm, and I said *if* those bad things happened, then I was gonna call this decade a wash. And guess what, they all did.

Here's the thing: I started out the decade by having a midlife crisis, a bad one. I was massively depressed and acting out in ways I don't even want to go into. Then in 2001 my mother got cancer. Then in 2004 my mother got cancer again - completely unrelated to the first one, apparently - and passed away in 2007 after two and a half years of struggling with a brain tumor. (Somewhere in there my father got cancer, too, actually, but that one got completely eclipsed. He's fine, and I don't really even count that.) Then it turned out that she made me her executor and I sent a good bit of time for the next year and a half dealing with that, the money issues and cleaning out and selling her house, and moving into a bigger apartment so we could house the stuff of hers we ended up with.

And then came the cherry on top of what was already a bad decade - just about a couple of months after we got the house sold and started seriously thinking we were wrapping up the estate, Ike hit. We were "displaced persons" for several weeks, and came home to find out our  apartment was flooded and we had to move. Two months later, I lost my job, also because of the hurricane. I needed to hunt for a job right when the economy was bottoming out - I stopped getting paid in January, although thanks (somewhat ironically) to the money from my mother's estate, I was able to opt out of immediate job hunting, and instead I've spent the last year as a student, of all the unexpected things. Hopefully all that will be resolved soon - more or less just in time for this kidney stone of a decade (TM Doonesbury*) to end.

I should say that there were good things about this decade; it wasn't all bad. Most importantly, there was my marriage, which started out on the verge of collapse and ended up really good. But viewed as a whole? It still sucked. (And don't you dare tell me that at least I inherited money, unless you want violence.)


And oh yeah, the "10 years ago" meme reminded me that I forgot about my even more lovely start to the decade: 10 years ago today, I was at the funeral of my beloved uncle Ted. And my grandmother, who was 89, died a few months later.


*That was Trudeau's epitaph for the 70s, as I recall.