Day eleven and the most notable symptoms of my grief include restlessness, exhaustion, and irritability.
The irritability is the worst.
Mom and I went to the mall yesterday to get out of the house. The Christmas music made us irritable. The singsongy voices of salespeople made us irritable. The disingenuous greetings. Irritable. We breezed by an employee in her late teens, ignoring her confrontational how are you. She snottily said, “Awesome!” behind our backs and I looked over my shoulder to see her make an exasperated gesture to her coworker.
I turned on my heel. Irritated.
“I don’t know what kind of attitude that was that you gave my mother just now, but I thought you should know that she buried her husband this week, so you know, maybe you could cut her a little slack.”
“I wasn’t giving her attitude.”
“Excuse me? The sneer? The [eyeroll/faux enthusiasm] ‘awesome!’? You should really be ashamed of yourself.”
“I’m sorry.”
But it was a shitty apology, so this confrontation did not make me feel better. I spent the rest of the shopping trip fuming, thinking of how I could have made her appropriately sorry for her insensitivity. My normal tools for self-manipulation (reminding myself that I don’t believe in bad people, reminding myself that the kind of person who lacks the social graces to respond appropriately in such a situation will probably be forced to work second-rate retail jobs at second-rate malls for the rest of her life, which is a pretty extreme punishment in itself) were ineffective. I can’t just let it go.
The irritability is the worst. I hate most people today.