Love is forever…One woman’s journey with grief

I guess I saw this coming, but I tried to chalk it up to hormones.  My PMS is bad, particularly in the emotional aspect, and I tend to get paranoid, depressed, irritable, and to think the whole world hates me.  That’s what I wanted to think this was, because I’ve been doing better.

But it seems that the ups and downs of grief caught me on the flipside again, and took me down, down, down.  All my perspective, all the understanding, all the deep thinking I’ve been doing are MIA right now, and even as I write this, I’m sighing ragged sighs still from the crying I did half an hour ago, crying enough that I found the keys wet when I touched them.  I don’t remember leaning over them while crying, but it hardly matters.

I’ve been having a rough time of it, on and off, the last few days.  Eating seems like a bother.  I haven’t felt like playing guitar.  Maybe it’s the season taking its toll after all.  I don’t know.  But I took a moment here and there to feel my feelings, then pulled myself together, figuring that it was chemical, not emotional, and I try to remember that how I see things when I’m under the influence of my hormones is not necessarily how they are.  I tried to rationalize it, to outrun it.

But I hit the wall Tuesday night.  It started when I went out to the salad buffet for dinner.  I eat spinach as my greens in a salad.  There was a notice over the spinach that it was safe and didn’t come from affected farms.  Those would be affected farms in California, where A lived, farms we drove past and through together on our way to Monterrey, watching the migrant workers stooped in the fields.

Further down the line were jicama strips.  A and I talked about jicama, and I told him he’d like it, and should try it, and that when I was there in July we’d get some, and I’d slice it up and feed it to him like peeled grapes, only not grapes.  And then he died two weeks before that trip, and we never got to eat jicama together, one of a million things we didn’t get to do that we were going to.  Like going to Big Basin together.  He went without me, two weeks ago, as ashes.  And I will have to go alone.

Then I watched the ER I’d taped last Thursday.  It was the Christmas episode, and it tore my heart open, not because people died, but because the theme was love, so much love and of different kinds.  And even in this world filled with so much hurt, so much apparent evil, so much apathy, every single day people do loving things great and small.  Love is it.  It’s the reason.  It’s the only reason.  And understanding that, I was overwhelmed.  Just totally overwhelmed, with love, with compassion, with loss, and with a longing for A so piercing, I was done for.  My heart aches and all the tears that have been building up for days, maybe weeks, are coming out. 

I am not unloved, and I am not totally alone in the world.  I don’t even believe I’m without A’s love, even now.  I know he’s out there, still loving me as I love him.  But I am without the man, to talk to, to touch, to hold, to make laugh and smile, to enjoy together the amazing love we’d found, to introduce to jicama.  And nothing I think or do or want is going to change that.  This is supposed to be a slow dance with two of us, and I’m doing a solo.  And I don’t know any of the steps, and there is no joy in my heart for dancing.  Not today.  Today I’m just falling apart.