Journal pages 2581-2584, uncensored
I had an okay day yesterday, though I was distracted most of it, thinking about your passing. I’ve been relying on my grief group a lot the last 2 days. Lots of posts. It helps to talk about it, get stuff off my chest to people who understand. When a friend asks if I’m down about you (after I just say I’m down), she just says *hug* and then we move on to other subjects, usually my doing after an awkward pause.
I guess I really can’t blame her. I think these people I find lacking are just getting the brunt of my anger not that they can’t say the thing that will make this all better, but that NO ONE can make it better. I keep waiting for someone to say the magic words, but no one ever does. Leads one to believe that there just aren’t any, so my anger at them is misplaced.
I’m angry at the Universe for setting up this painful bullshit system, and leaving me, and everybody else, adrift and aching for answers they are not going to get. Even I, so studied in grief and loss as I’ve become in the last year, have no answers. I merely say “I’m so sorry.” Because I am. Because anything else seems unhelpful and intrusive, to try to frame someone else’s grief for them.
I need to find that passage in that Dog Years book about sentimentality being the mask for rage at impermanence. It spoke to me as Truth, defining what I haven’t been able to. I am angry that there are absolutely no options but to submit to ignorance. Where is the healing in that? I can wrap myself in my pain and stagnate, or I can accept loss with a grace I don’t actually possess. Is there no middle ground? Are there no clear, comprehensible answers that make sense to this human mind, the only one I’ve got? Nothing that helps me accept and understand why being without you for at least 20 fewer years than I could reasonably expect is for the greater good, yours, mine, or whoever’s? It’s not enough to say, “Have faith; you will understand in time.” If this is the understanding I have, and the context I live in, those are the answers I need, in a context I can understand. The unknown is rarely a friend to any of us. I find it hard to believe this is the system. It’s not a good system.
If, like that Conversations with God book said, we’re here to remember who we are, what sense does it make that we must hide the truth from ourselves in order to rediscover it? None. If we are all The All, and we create this, why would we need to forget to spend a life remembering, at huge emotional costs? I guess I’ve finally found my way to being angry at “God,” or the Universe, as I prefer. Even if I must accept that I don’t understand, I do so with no little resentment. Because I’m just pissed right now. The universe has no right to take you away from me without explaining itself, damn it!
I have no philosophy left today. I have no perspective left, if I ever had any to begin with. (I don’t know that I did.)
All I know is that I miss you, and that it’d be nice to feel good, period, instead of feeling good in spite of. Will I ever feel a pure, unalloyed joy again for longer than it takes to remember you’re gone? This sucks, A. It really does. How did you do it? How did you become the funny, fun, life-affirming man I love after losing your dad, your mom, and P? How did you get from A to Q? I was fun, funny, and life-affirming before this happened. But now?
Well, I’m still funny. But as for the other two, I just don’t know. I don’t feel like I’ve been fun since you left. I feel like I’ve aged far more than a year in the last twelve months. I feel old and tired. I affirm life on principle, but I’m rather short on joie de vivre, and bitterness lurks constantly on my doorstep. It’s hard not to let it in and feed it. It’s all hard. The only thing easy in this is feeling sad and baffled. That’s my default now. Not really who I was before.
Certainly, I’ve been served what is probably a much-needed portion of humility. But my world view has changed, because my world has, and the certainty I thought I had before has been replaced by nothing but a vast space filled with questions and possibilities. But no matter how much appreciation one cultivates for the tempest, eventually we have to wash ashore, don’t we? And bless the firmness of the ground under our weary bodies?
I have wanted you back all this time. There has not been a day since we met that I didn’t want you, here in my life. Not a single one. I ache for you. That ache is just another of my chronic pains. I no longer remember life without it.