Love is forever…One woman’s journey with grief

I’ve been thinking a lot about “going on.”  And while I suppose I should appreciate the triumph of the human spirit that allows us to go on in the face of crushing blows such as a loved one dying, I have a lot of confusion and horrified marveling going on in my head in regards to that.  

What I mean is, there’s a big part of me that is amazed that it’s even possible.  I frequently stand outside myself wondering how I do it.  How do I keep going?  How do I do the everyday things after this has happened?  It’s not a self-congratulatory thing; as a matter of fact, I’m baffled by it.

Because there is another part of me that thinks I shouldn’t be able to.  That I shouldn’t be able to survive this.  That it should’ve killed me.  I wonder why it didn’t.  I can’t seem to get over the fact that I lost my sweetie, and yet I get up every day and live a life even so, one that does not exclude laughter and enjoyment.  I find it bizarre in the extreme.  I try not to worry that the seeming normalcy I find myself in most of the time is not a statement about my love for A, nor about how much I miss him.  I keep telling myself that it’s not disloyal to feel better, but still, the suspicion nags at me.  I don’t want the pain; it did nothing for me, and intellectually I understand that relinquishing it is good for me.  But I have to say, I don’t feel like I relinquished it.  When I bother to think about it at all, I think it feels like the pain relinquished me, for the most part.  And I wonder how that happened.  And I wonder why I feel like part of me is begging it to take me back.

I mean, I could tell you that I talked about it to anyone who would listen, and journaled a thousand pages about it, and read book after book trying to help myself, and forced myself to do as much as I felt able to in creating a positive, continuing life with E, and maybe that is the entire collective answer.  But it doesn’t seem so.  Nevertheless, I feel better, more often, than I ever imagined I would again.

But I doubt.  I doubt the authenticity my recovery because there are so many steps, sometimes huge steps, backwards in it.  I doubt the propriety of my recovery because there’s something in my head that says it’s too soon, and it argues with the part of my mind that says things take exactly as long as they need, and why are you questioning it, anyway?  I guess I haven’t given up my need to be in control of this process, all processes to which I am a party, to know where I am at on this map of my life.  And yet, as I can only draw it by living it, I suppose wanting a big orange “YOU ARE HERE” sticker on something that isn’t even finished is not really reasonable or feasible.

Six months ago today, I found out that he had died.  It’s been six months of rollercoaster emotions, and no idea what any given day, or any given hour, will bring me.  That continues.  Emotionally, my expectations are continually surprised by reality.  It is my nature to figure out my “stuff,” but for 6 months I find the only reasonably satisfactory response I have to why these things happen and why I feel the way I do at any given moment is to throw up my hands and say “I don’t know.  It is what it is.  Stop thinking about it.”  How do you analyze the inscrutable, the numinous, the silent?  The better question, for me, is, “How do you stop trying to analyze it?”  If I could have the answer to that, and do it, I could live with not having the answers to all the rest.

But I am forever going back and forth between not wanting to be mentally or spiritually lazy and irresponsible, figuring I owe it to myself and everyone who has to deal with me to have as good a handle on my stuff as possible, and accepting that I’ll never figure all of me out.  I read recently a phrase that has kept ringing in my mind ever since:  “We cannot know the truth about ourselves; we can only live it.”  I get that, but my knowing is incomplete, because I’m still grasping at straws of control that will ultimately just turn out to be straw.  Sometimes I think if I could stop clawing and learn to enjoy the free-fall, then maybe I’d be able to fly.