hyperbets’ blog

Holy shit, anybody want to move to Norway with us?  (A guy I dated in HS actually lives this amazing life there now.  The house he has on his family's website looks like a freakin Ikea catalog.)  Hell, any other country sounds good to me right now.  Don't think that John and I aren't like, "hmmmmmm, we could be composers and photographers in another country...."  

When i got home I saw I had 4 messages. I immediately hear my mom's screaming voice and something about my sister had hung herself.  I felt a jolt of lightning hit my body and I picked up the phone and started frantically dialing. I couldn't get the phone to work or anyone to answer. I'm telling John to call people on my cell.  My heart was beating out of my chest. I got a hold of someone at the Parkview ER, where my mother had said to call.  I told them I was Penny's sister and could they please give me some information.  They just told me my sister was there but the family had all gone home.  Oh, good. I thought.  She is fine and everybody just went....home? 

I called my mom's house and when I asked my brother what was going on (my brother lives in angola, it was sinking in that something major had happened) I heard him say that we had lost her and he trailed off in a sob.  

My dad finally picked up the phone to tell me that my sister had passed away. She had a fight with her husband and hung herself in the garage while her husband ran to the store.  It happened around noon today. 

I got the message at 4.  

The rest of my day was a whirlwind of panic, sobbing, disbelief and shaking.  John was amazing.  He stayed with the baby (thank God I laid him down for a nap as soon as we got home and before I checked my messages) while I went to my family.  

I'm handling everything.  I'm planning the funeral today, I picked her clothes, I'm writing the obit, the eulogy and making the video slideshow.  It's so important to make a good funeral for her kids.  They are teens and I can't imagine what this will do to them.  I'm so sick at the thought of doing this though. I'm exhausted already and this nightmare just began. 

I'm so scared.  All I can see is her body hanging.  What that must have felt like and I want SO BADLY to just go back in time and tell her not to do this.  

Poor John, he is just shattered too. He's so busy with work right now, but he's so awesome at helping me.  We got some client work done last night and he just took care of everything else for me.  I love him so much and I'm just so afraid I'm going to lose someone else now.  I just want to hold Miles and John tight so I don't have to feel this way again. 

The thing is, I remember feeling complete grief when I lost Andy, but I wasn't afraid like this.  There is so much darkness surrounding suicide that there just isn't any peace.  What comforts me?  That my sister was so depressed (and we didn't know it) that she thought hanging herself was her BEST option!? This is a nightmare. 

I have to go now.  I need to get ready to go to the funeral parlor.  My sister's clothes are in my car and it smells like her perfume in there.  She was a really casual person and we are burying her in jeans and a sweater.  Can you do that?  It feels weird, but everything about this feels this way. 

Fuck. This sucks so badly.  SO FUCKING HORRIBLE.  Sorry for such a depressing post but I need to get it out and I can't write this on my regular blog.  

I'm going to take her daughter shopping for something to wear.  Is that ok?  Will I fuck her up in the head doing that?  My sister didn't have a lot of money, so I don't her daughter to stress about what to wear.  Then again, it might totally freak her out.  I hope I do the right thing.  

Thanks for listening and I'm really sorry you have to read this.  I"m shushing now. 

Money has been on my mind lately. Actually, not mine as much as everyone else's.  It seems like everybody is talking about money.  How much things cost, where to buy stuff the cheapest, the awesome deal so and so got on such and such.  It's been kind of bugging me.  Probably because I just raised my prices so when I hear conversations like this my mind wanders to people's thoughts on that.   Besides that, I see an increasing focus on the end result of what ends up in people's hands, but not a lot of focus on where these lower prices are coming from. I've been thinking about that a lot lately and then I watched a movie with John tonight.  

I watched a documentary called "Who Killed the Electric Car." It's on how GM made an electric car in the 90's that worked really well. They didn't make many, but they had a small cult following (due to the small amount that were made in a limited region) and I really think if GM hadn't done such weird cryptic advertising and more people had known about them, they would have caught on. Also, had GM mass produced them so they could be more cost efficient, people other than wealthy movie stars could have afforded them too. Back to the film; California had such pollution problems that they started to write up legislation that was going to force car makers to make a certain percentage of their cars to be zero emission by the year 2000. Meanwhile, GM came out with their electric (battery powered plug in) car called the EV1.  However, faced with legislation that might force them to make a larger percentage of their product line zero emissions, they apparently freaked out. Car makers and oil companies lobbied to get the legislation shut down and GM went so far as to completely stop the creation of electric cars. When the leases ran out, they confiscated the cars from people who wanted to buy them after their leases were up and destroyed them.  Perfectly good, working cars that were quiet, clean and efficient were shredded and put in junk yards.  It was really frustrating because here was a perfectly good answer to decreasing our dependance on foreign oil, not to mention a step towards cleaner air and there is just one left sitting in a museum now. John and I were talking about this and just about the time the cars were pulled from the market was when everybody started going nuts about Hummers. Remember that? It was around 2001 or so.  What a sad commentary that we took this total backward shift from what could have been a really great solution to the exact opposite. They even had larger cars that were battery powered, so they all weren't the tiny European looking cars you think of when you think of an electric car. 

So one of the reasons they blamed on the death of the electric car was American consumers not being willing to deal with a car that needed to be plugged in and wanting instant gratification that you get from the pump.  I shook my head at that as I was watching the film but I'm just as bad. I was talking about garbage bags with a friend (yes, it was a gripping conversation) and she mentioned that they had bags you could buy that would break down in the landfill.  I said, "Yea, we bought those for a while but they are too expensive." Ok, so there I am, just another close minded consumer focused on the dollar and not on the big picture of what I'm buying is doing in the end. I really want to try to work harder at being careful where I shop and what I buy. It may not seem like it, but there is an impact. Why didn't we buy the Prius we wanted when we were car shopping a couple years ago? I listened to friends who told me I needed a big car for a carseat. John and I still slap our selves on the foreheads for that one. Everytime I see a Prius drive by I think, "Good for them!....I'm such an idiot."

I'm trying to make this blog make sense. I could have gone the environmental route on this issue, but tonight this just really hit me in the wallet. It's just been a sad night because as I said, I've been hearing so much talk about money lately but really very little talk on buying conscientiously with the bigger picture in mind. So as they say, be the change you want to see in the world.  So I'll work on that.  Perhaps I'll go buy some bio-degradable garbage bags. ; ) 

Since we are talking about cars tonight, here's a funky photo John took about a year and a half ago of some crazy frost on our car.  We had never seen frost stand straight up on end.  Thanks for hanging in there with me on this long winded post. I had to get my thoughts out or I wouldn't be able to slee