I have walked this road for more than a year and a half, with it's many twists and turns, bumps and crevices, I have trudged on.
One thing I have come to know is there are very few straight parts. That is, most of the trip has been like walking in circles, though not just a solitary circle, more like circles that connect for forward progression. Does that even make ANY sense? It does to me, I get it, I can see it plain as day. I see it like seeing an aerial view of on/off ramps on a map. Do you see it? Do you have the picture? Now put millions of them together...THAT is the road I am on.
I know there are many many other nameless, faceless souls on my path, it cannot be only me. I've not met them face to face, we have not spoken, but I know they must be there invisible to the naked eye. We all have our own walk to walk I suppose.
There have been periods of time on this journey when the video in my head has been running in slooow motion, it has never stopped but it has slowed down from time to time. It is in this motion, slow, that I am better able to cope with it, because it moves so slow I see it coming and can redirect my eyes somewhere else, but now, since the calendar started reading 2015 it is like someone has flipped a switch. Once again the past plays out fast and furious and before I can see it coming I am doubled over with my hands covering my eyes. I struggle for air and try to get my balance. It is the craziest thing. You don't get used to it. It is grief to the millionth power, and it is way bigger than me.
It is pain. It has knocked me down and I must climb up out of it again.
Will it ever end?
I am also on the same path, same circles. I don't think I am able to do anything more than watch as my life picks whatever it plans to hand me because I don't feel I have any control over it anymore. I knew this month would be rough what with my birthday, his death and cremation dates but I was not prepared for how brutal it would be as I reached the two year mark. The endless triggers followed by the inevitable breakdowns have left me wondering whether I will have any sense of stability or sanity going into my third year. There is no explaining what shaking hands with death does to the person left behind. No one can imagine where your mind ends up taking you.
ReplyDeleteAnd you are spot on when you say it is grief to the millionth power. I have told a close friend it is like that illustration where you see the guy with only his hands and eyes over the rim of the hole. That’s where I live most of the time. Afraid to come out and get bashed by reality and then sometimes it just runs over the hole and I give up my grip and fall in. Never in my happy life did I ever expect this from me. Not the strong, independent, determined woman I had imagined I was. Now I'm not sure if it was just a poor joke on myself or just a vivid imagination but I am no longer that woman.
It's ok. I have started to just give in to the beatings and keep my head low for the rest of the time. I know it will ever change. I will go through the motions until my body gives out. In the meantime I think longingly of happier times and maniacally keep myself busy during my waking hours. It's the only thing that keeps me from remembering. Remembering just hurts too much.
Thanks you for your postings……it helps to know I am not alone in my feelings.
Oh Mrs. C...I don't think you imagined who you were, nor was it a poor joke. I believe you were exactly who you felt you were, as was I.
DeleteI think that we are no longer those women because they went with our husbands. The heartstrings were so strong that we were pulled into death with them. As dramatic and maybe morbid as that sounds to someone who has not "shaken hands with death", as you said, I feel it to be truth. At least for me. I couldn't be any further from who I was if I tried. It's very unsettling and alien, and what makes it worse is the people in your life have NO IDEA what it is like for us. They couldn't possibly unless they too lost a husband/wife to death. This grief is like no other.
I was just on my hands and knees vacuuming when suddenly the vision of my husband drowning flashed before my eyes (again) and I burst out crying...I mean WTF, I'm cleaning...I'm keeping busy. How are we supposed to pick ourselves up, gather strength and get past this 'thing' when we are continually blindsided? It is overwhelming, exhausting and oh so disheartening.
It will change though, I believe it will, I have to. I think one day we will have lived 'this' life so long that we will have created a new self (do we have a choice?) with a new found respect for ourselves having lived through what we did. Some don't you know Mrs. C. Some were never strong enough to begin with and they succumb to drugs, alcohol and suicide. That will not be me, I will not let it happen.
You are strong Mrs. C, I can tell. Somewhere inside the pain there is a seed of who we were, in time it is that seed that will grow into our new self. It will do so because we loved the shell of a woman we are now, enough to let the grief happen however it sees fit. We don't fight it, we live in it, and one day it will finally let us walk out the other side with our head held high.
We have not met, but I feel love for you. I know you, you are me. If that kind of compassion is inside me then I know I'm not too far lost and I will be okay. Would you agree?
You are not alone Mrs. C, you will find me here any time you need an ear and a shoulder. PEACE to you my sister.
Kristen,
ReplyDeleteYour question as to how we are supposed to get past this overwhelming burden of grieving when we are continually blindsided is the million dollar question and that for which we are continually searching for the answer. I don’t know. I wish I did.
When you drew the picture of vacuuming on your knees and how you ended up crying in a meltdown envisioning David in the water I could see you and feel your pain as I read that. I cannot wrap my head around the cirumstances of your husbands death. I cannot imagine what that must have been like for you. Helpless. Screaming. Disbelief. Fear. Helpless. I just cannot imagine. Mine wasn’t great but yours was beyond tragic. Yours was surreal. How do you get beyond surreal?
So the answer we wish for as to how we go on being blindsided and still function is my daily struggle. I am isolating myself more and more as I just don’t want to engage barring what might intrude to upset me even more. I keep analyzing in my head what I can do to help myself. I want to know where he is. I want to know why he died when others live.
I keep doing things to keep myself busy but nothing fills that void. After Greg died I packed up 35 years of our life together and sold our home during the first 8 months of my grief journey so it is not as though I haven’t tried to reconstruct. I did that because I could no longer hold down my job and grieve at the same time and the expenses were just too much responsibility. Then after spending months lying around in a cabin provided by my sister I ended up rehabbing two homes, one I now live in and another for a rental. But all of this has been an empty exercise in futility. I cannot seem to reason why I need to do this.
I hear your reason, I really do. I say it to myself. Because we have to. Because we have no other choice. That we will have created a new self and thus we will live that life. I have listened as others have oft repeated that same mantra. Yet, am I really that strong? Can I do it without his love because there will be no other? Of that I can be sure.
That is the ultimate conflict I struggle with every single moment. Not only can I, because I guess I have shown that I can. More to the crux of the dilemna is do I want to? Is there something other than the deep connection that sustained my every reason for being? Whatever it is, is it worth discovering whilst enduring the most debilitating of psychic pain just to say I did it? That I wasn’t beat down by life in all its guises? I am yet to be convinced. I can be honest and say I wish every day for an easy, foolproof painless relief. I am tired. I really don’t need a future. I cannot stop questioning the reality of what I am forced to accept and yet here I am. I biologically function but the brain cannot compute the information it has received. I don’t know how long this can go on but I know one thing for sure. This is not life. An alternate reality maybe but not life. Without his love a dimension where a false sense of unity with my surroundings makes for increasing detachment. I’ve never gone this long without an answer to my most pressing of questions and I don’t see any clarity of purpose emerging anytime soon.
I know we have the same unanswered questions. I wish for you more than me a faith in patience. I think I am just too old to care and really have no one to care about. Not so much sad just resignation. Just slowly wimping out at the weather on Everest even knowing beforehand the extreme cold, wind and ice would make it a treacherous climb.
No, you are so right, this is not life. Not even almost.
DeleteI fight fight fight for great amounts of time, then I quit for a while. There is nothing left to fight with. I'm raising a 17 year old daughter, so for her I start the fight again until I can't any more. It has gone this way for almost 21 months, it is not a life at all, and I too feel the need to pull away more and more and keep to myself. What keeps me going is the upswing...it is just around the corner. I keep my sights on all those freaking upswings until I have won this battle. My husband David and my friend Evelyn, they died together, would want me to be well and happy and at peace. They would never wish for me to be in the state I am. Who knows, maybe some day, right?!?
Your Greg would not want you to give up either, he would want you to find a niche you can live in peacefully without so much pain and sorrow. And I strongly feel that there is no good reason, no good explanation for our questions. "It is not for us to question why, but for us to do and die" --Tennyson