Last year after finalizing the process of taking over this, my sister’s blog & domain, and after organizing her memorial and inurnment, I wrote a post announcing that I’d be the new resident blogger behind Dr Wise Money here.
I left the posts my sister had scheduled into late May to publish automatically. Besides that, I made just one post consisting of one line from a book I was re-reading at that time. I made no reply to the kind comments that have trickled in, and I wrote no drafts, queued no posts, and in fact did not visit this site even as a pair of passing eyes of the web.
I didn’t know what to do here.
*
In 2016, about 9 months before taking her own life, my sister made the decision to throw down what was for her an agonizing, impulsive and regrettable (by her own admissions) amount of money to secure the domain for her budding young blog. It wasn’t money she couldn’t afford, but it was money she in her extreme, obsessive frugality would not spare on herself for clothes or food or any imaginable material upgrade. After she left, I decided I didn’t want her choices and her efforts to go to waste in the long oblivion of the dead. I had been approached to sell it, which I wonder if she might have preferred (ha), but something in me also couldn’t let it go that way.
Instead I chose to take it over, and could not figure out what to do with it.
I’d worked briefly on this her blog before, until she in the throes of her mental illness cut me out. Later, she asked me to return but I declined citing I was not yet ready. Truthfully, I might have never gotten ready. That’s how I can be. Sometimes I hardly ever go forward. Though we were working together, my sister lapped me ferociously daily, hourly, in every moment. I found it hard to ramp up posting frequency despite ample free time, and often reversed published posts to work vaguely more on their perceived kinks. She’d ask that I edit her posts but never adhered to schedules agreed upon, and I constantly felt I couldn’t keep up. In fact I couldn’t. That was the doing of her mania, as well as my penchant to plan, plan, plan, and never do.
“Sometimes it’s better to do”, my sister used to urge me by saying.
*
It is better to do. It’s best to do what you know & love. So let’s just start with what I’m reading and go from there. Last night I finished An Imaginary Life by David Malouf, which was astonishingly beautiful, even glorious. Here is an excerpt from the book:
“But we are free after all. We are bound not by the laws of our nature but by the ways we can imagine ourselves breaking out of those laws without doing violence to our essential being. We are free to transcend ourselves. If we have the imagination for it.”
Happy Friday, be safe out there, and be good to one another and yourself.
Comments, concerns, questions and suggestions are welcome as always.
Pingback:The Sunday Best (3/11/2018) - Physician on FIRE
Thank you for posting. Your sister’s website really peaked my interest in student loan payoff strategies, and has helped me immensely. I am glad you are continuing it. It seems far to common for physicians to commit suicide. She is very missed.
Thank you, SG. I’m sorry I’m not much help on the personal finance advice front, unlike my sister had been. I’m happy to know that at least she was able to be of assistance. I agree the disproportionally high rate of physician suicide (compared to gen pop) is unsettling and deserves genuine, profound efforts to address it. I couldn’t agree more that she is very missed.
Wanted to share a guest post I wrote for PIMD. Your sister got me started thinking about how to use credit cards for my benefit in student loan repayment. I expanded on her ideas and created the following
https://passiveincomemd.com/student-loan-hack-for-high-income-professionals/
Thanks for sharing 🙂
I am very sorry for your lost, and I cannot imagine what you have gone through and how you are processing it. Mental illness sucks.
We are all glad to see you back in the community, though.
I appreciate your drive to continue something in your sister’s memory while honoring your own person, too. I am excited to see where you take this regardless of how frequently or infrequently you decide to post. Whether you are plan, plan, planning… Or doing… We will be here to support your efforts on this site.
Hi there,
I love your name. It made me think if being an anesthesiologist (having the ability & responsibility to steward people in and out of the state of consciousness) has made a philosopher of you or were you drawn to the trade by your philosophical inclinations?
Truly, though, thank you for what you wrote here. Sometimes I think if there’s no one that will read this blog again it’s enough for me to have as one of the so few things I still have that connect me with Amanda who was my only sibling. Sometimes I feel guilty that I’ve not done enough to grow her project and help her vision thrive. It’s really nice to have encouragement and validation to just _be_. We could all use a little of that from time to time 🙂