When you haven't lost a thing

But it feels like it is already gone.

WARNING: This gets dark, is about death and grief. But it is also about CM Punk.

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Grief is many things. Sometimes it only happens after a loss; if that family member who absolutely sucked dies, it’s not a loss, it’s a gain and there is no grief. Let me also clarify, this is a truly bad human. It’s not “HEY! WELL uncle Bob was a total asshole but he was also a caring madman!” at the wake or showing or viewing or memorial, however it is called in your locale.

Grief is many things. It’s an often long, drawn-out process that you feel way too young and way too overwhelmed to see, even if you aren’t that young. I knew about it, when my mom was dying. And then I went to see her in her last days and I was nothing close to prepared. In-home hospice is a CHOICE. What happened there was, sparing a great many details, a nightmare. I left before she passed. Grief is many things. She wouldn’t have died with me there, anyway.

Grief is many things. It is anticipatory. In ways, I think, there is no worse grief than the anticipatory, knowing that something will go away, forever, before you. Gone. When I was born, my father was 55 years old. When I was 10 years old, he was 65 and could (per the government and maybe a union) retire. He’d then stay up all night, either watching weird sports, golf tournaments in Australia, drinking Strohs, hanging out with Smurfy (that fucking cat, my lord!) and just weirdo shit. Where do you think I got all of this from?

He wasn’t allowed to enlist for WW2 because he had too much anxiety. Like, hello.

But the staying up all night and sleeping on the couch had me freaked out once I was a teenager. A person who, still, does not have a driver license (long story, just trust me, I shouldn’t have one) took the school bus on days the weather wasn’t nice enough to walk home. But, when you have a father who is 70 years old, still sound asleep on the couch in the room of the house you live in that you walk into first, maybe you’re afraid that he’s died.

He didn’t. Made it to juuuuuuuuust before 80. I saw it coming about a month before it happened and two weeks before he was told it was. He was years off of getting a whole MFing lung removed because of other cancer. And it wasn’t like he was young.

The anticipatory grief is what hurts me the most. Abandonment. Abandonment, I guess.

I apologize for unpacking this at you.

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This is all to say: CM Punk is coming back to AEW.

For years, crowds (most in WWE, but also elsewhere) chanted his name. I was there —because I live in Chicago and I sometimes begrudgingly, and un-ironically, love the guy — for the First Dance. The First Dance was by the by one of the coolest experiences, pro wrestling or otherwise, that I’ve had in my life.

I don’t know why he did what he did the night of All Out. It truly isn’t for me to know, though I do know he ate some really good muffins. I don’t know. No one except those who know, know. We all otherwise think and speculate and hear bits and pieces from people who may have been there or claimed to be there.

I think two things: first, that if this just really was an off the cuff work by Punk, Tony Khan should have done more to shut it down; secondly, if this was a work the whole fucking time, BRAVO. It’s better than the Bloodline-Sami-Kevin angle, among the savviest things in the industry, ever.

You can see the stages of grief every time CM Punk has done anything. Whether going from ROH to WWE, to whatever he did there before “pipe bomb,” to everyone chanting his name when he chose to step away, to the United Center even though we all knew he’d be there, to the “Brawl Out” and what is apparently coming next: It’s the knowledge that he’s here, but that he will inevitably go away, and the knowledge of everything that entails.

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Look in my eyes, what do you see?

Death is an inevitability.

Love,

Andrea