It Is What It Is

One year today. A year. How the hell did that happen?

A little over a year ago, I went up to Pennsylvania to see Lisa for the last time. We spent three days together. We both knew what was coming and we had more than just our last visit to get out of the way.

I knew going in that being Lisa’s Power of Blog was going to be rough. I’m still baffled as to why she chose ME to oversee her blog after she left to become that Honky Tonk Girl in the sky.

I sat on the sofa, she in her hospital bed in the living room.

“I don’t get it, Lisa. Why me? Don’t you understand I SUCK at death?”

She smiled and said, “That’s only one part of why you’re perfect for the job.”

“But I cried when Bambi’s mother was killed, and that was a fucking cartoon!”

“John doesn’t know anything about this blogging shit, Karl. I need you to do this for me.”

“Of course I’m going to do it, Lisa. I agreed to do it a long time ago. I just didn’t realize you were going to take me up on it so soon.”

“I’m not happy about it, either,” she said. “But it is what it is.”

I was tearing up then as I looked into her eyes, and I’m tearing up again as I write this.

I’ve always hated that phrase. It’s my logical mind that hates it. It is what it is. NATURALLY. It certainly can’t be what it’s NOT.

We laughed a lot in those 3 days. Cried a lot, too. I watched and marveled at her interactions with her family, how she remained strong for those girls even when she was in severe pain. She rode them about their homework, even from that bed. And she rode me, too.

“I want you to be happy, Karl,” she said the night before I was to leave back for Florida.

I shook my head. “I don’t even think I know what that word means, Lisa.”

“Yes, you do. And you will. Life is too short to be miserable, Karl.”

Weeks after I left snowy PA behind, kissed Lisa goodbye for the last time, and she was gone.

The past year for John and Teeny and Cam, I can’t begin to imagine what it’s been like for them. They were integral parts of Lisa’s life.

Me? I was just a fool who stumbled across her path somehow. We exchanged blog comments, emails, phone calls, texts. We met in person at TequilaCon in Philly and she rocked. She was on my show a couple of times, and it was there that we came up with the Power of Blog, there that she asked me to be hers.

Trying to describe the past year for me, post Clusterfook, is difficult. I’ve been a fucking mess in almost every sense of the word. I didn’t work for pretty much all of 2009, which ultimately cost me my job. My recluse ways were magnified to the nth degree. Even though I went to TequilaCon and BlogHer and other places last year, I really just wanted to stay in my house.

I’ve been a wreck. Being responsible for her blog killed me for a while there. Not knowing how to handle it, not knowing what to post and what not to post on Clusterfook. And just not feeling like I’m up to the trust she bestowed upon me.

Somehow, I think she knew what being Power of Blog would do to me, and for me. I barely knew her in many ways, and yet she wanted me to take this on for her.

I see Lisa every day, and it makes me smile and tear up. Constant reminders on Facebook to comment on her wall, send her a message. On the rare occasion that I put a post together on Clusterfook, and I see Lisa announce a new post on Twitter…oof. Kills me.

That she was concerned with my happiness while on her deathbed…gah. Asking how *I* was while she was dying? But that was Lisa. She was this Zen Rock Bitch with everyone, not just me.

I’m not happy. Anyone who reads my words here knows that. I’m pretty sick of myself, of being miserable, constantly whining and bitching about my life.

But if Lisa was still here, she’d be kicking my ass. She might say something like, “You’re working on it, Karl. You’re making a lot of changes. It’s going to come.”

And I’d say something like, “I feel like I’m throwing bricks in the Grand Canyon, trying to fill it.”

She’d smile and say, “It is what it is.”

And I’d groan and roll my eyes.

I’m working on the happy part, and even if I never get there, I’m gonna keep pushing on. Life’s too short to be miserable.

I miss you, Lisa.