On journeys and grief
There is much discussion of the “journey” through grief. On the one hand, it certainly is a journey, arduous, full of detours, unmarked roads, backtracking and no concrete understanding of the destination. On the other, I can appreciate the wisdom of perceiving grief as a journey. But when I saw it described as such recently, I thought, “Damn, I’m tired of this journey. I don’t want a journey through grief. I don’t want grief at all. I want my boy back.”
Right now, I’m not feeling the wisdom, the perspective, the bigger picture that in my better moments I do. Right now I’m just down, and have been to greater or lesser degree for the last week and then some. It doesn’t help that it’s cloudy and cold, which always makes my poor mood worse. I find myself shaking my head a lot again, asking the same old questions again, wondering (again, for the umpteenth time) how a person can just stop being. I don’t want to learn from this. I don’t want to have to be enlightened about this. Yeah, I feel better when I can be, but when I’m not feeling so great I can’t find that place from either direction. When you’re down, you’re down, and it’s hard to talk yourself out of it. When you’re coping, you’re coping, and you don’t need to talk yourself out of it. It feels like a pendulum to me. I feel like a pendulum, swinging back and forth between okay and not-so-okay, but the swing is slow.
Everybody said the holidays would be hard, but I didn’t know how true that would be for me. We didn’t celebrate the holidays like everyone else because of the long-distance thing. He was with his family on the actual holidays, I was with mine, and we opened gifts whenever both of ours had arrived in each other’s mail, and talked about the holidays the next day. I don’t know if it’s the holidays, or the slow ramp up of depression leading up to my trip to guitar camp. The last 2 years I’ve so looked forward to this trip, from October on. It was always our trip. It’s 4 weeks away, and it’s going to be a hard one, for sure. Every minute of that trip was infused with him. And now I have nothing to look forward to but what won’t be happening, and wondering how I’m going to manage. We won’t be reunited with a long hug and kiss at the airport. We won’t be going for our traditional night-before-camp dinner of teriyaki cheesesteaks. We won’t spend the evening catching up, marveling at just being in the same room together for a change. We won’t spend the 5 hours driving up to camp talking about music and holding hands. We won’t be settling into a cute B&B at night, talking about what he saw all day and what I did at camp all day. We won’t have lunch in Sausalito on the way back home. And we won’t have 3 more days on top of that to revel in each other’s company. Tears are springing to my eyes just writing those words, and I’m 4 weeks and 900 miles away. It probably won’t kill me, going. But I think it’ll come damn close.