Group Think

I slept until after 5:30 am today, which is great for me. I always seem to sleep longer and better when Dad is visiting. I’m not sure why. Maybe some worry or angst is alleviated that all the people (and animals) I need to keep alive are under one roof.

I also talked to Dr. Z yesterday and I told him about our getting ejected from the Grief Group back in April. I don’t know why I hadn’t told him before. Maybe I was a little ashamed about it. He was pretty shocked and upset about the story as I related it. He asked my permission to call the leader of the group and talk to her about the whole thing. He said that he felt responsible because he had referred us to the group and when he makes a referral he needs to know that the referral will be of value to his patients. So I agreed. He also had an idea that the Grief Group leader should allow us a phone call to vent our feelings of upset for the sake of closure, which I wasn’t really interested in since Anger Month is over. But I was curious about what the leader was going to say.

Dr. Z called back and left a message while Dad and Max and I were playing Hearts and said that he had talked to the Grief Group Leader. (Let’s call her Edwina.) Dr. Z reported that Edwina felt bad about how things turned out but was not in favor of Dr. Z’s plan to allow Max and I to scream at her for a while. She also said, rather ridiculously I thought, that if more freshly grieving parents joined the Grief Group, it would be a more appropriate group for us, so we should check back in with her every few months and she would let us know if it would be good for us to come back to the group. Okay, that’s absurd.

Me: “Hi Edwina, just checking to see if a sufficient number of crazy and angry new grieving parents have joined the group to allow for Max and me to come back after you kicked us out?”

Edwina: “Sorry, no, we are still discussing grief purely as an intellectual exercise, and hearing for the 4th time about how [redacted member’s name] was finally able to forgive himself for his child’s death that occurred in 1999 and the memorial tree that [redacted name] planted for her daughter in Israel.”

Me: “Oh, okay, we will continue to check in with you to see if we are able to be admitted to this unique and wonderful support group sometime during the coming decades.”

Or, we could just, as Max suggested, arrange for the murders of a number of other children and then for their parents to join the group en masse. There’s definitely a lot of angles to work here.