Called in heartsick
It’s 2:20 in the afternoon, and I am home on a sick day I don’t actually have the hours for, on an (attempted) mental health day, and a bit of improvement on the physical side would not go unappreciated, either. It’s been a bad couple of weeks, and a worse weekend, and though I have been trying like crazy to keep my head above water, I keep sinking nonetheless. I have taken relatively little time off for grief in the last almost 17 months, but today I decided I’d earned it; I was long past due.
I’ve been doing a lot of crying; it seems like I’m constantly on the verge, and I haven’t felt like this in months. It could be the holidays; it could be the constant and chronic physical pain that has been getting worse. It’s probably both, but when you hurt all the time, your strength to deal with everything else is taxed, and depleted faster than it would be if you were hale and whole. I have been neither for longer than I can remember.
I tried to keep busy this weekend, not even journaling as much as usual, because I didn’t want to dwell on the pain. It is here. I have to live with it. What point is there in trying to record it, analyze it? What could I say, to him, to myself, now that I have not said five thousand times since he died? “I hate this.” “I love you.” “I miss you.” Three small words that don’t do much to accurately describe the feeling they attempt to represent. Words cannot contain it; indeed, it feels like it extends beyond the borders of this heart, this body of mine.
I ache for him. I ache for me living without him to talk to every day. And I just plain ache. And I have been slowly tanking over the last 2 weeks, but I do not panic, because this is a familiar whirlpool I’m caught in. Recognizing it, though, doesn’t make it any easier to bear. I hurt, and I miss him so damn much, and it is particularly bad right now.
I can only think that this must be the middle passage, though I’ve no idea how long I will be here. I am no longer raw and bleeding, as I was. But I am not able to greet the day with joy in my heart and gratitude for the love I have known and enthusiasm for the life I still possess. Gratitude has never been an issue for me; of course I’m grateful for him, and for everyone and everything good that I still have in my life. But the loss, the missing him, these are my continuing companions. They travel every step with me. They speak with every breath I exhale.
I was sitting at the dining room table yesterday, making peanut butter balls for Christmas, as I do every year—even last year. It is a slow, tedious, mindless task, rolling all those balls, and I was lost in thought as I looked out the window at the birds and the mountains, and I pondered the hole in my soul. It occurred to me, though, that that is not an apt comparison, because a hole can, and will, be filled. Nature almost guarantees it. And you will not be able to tell it was ever there once it is filled. That is not the case here.
I was thinking that our love was a shining city, the sun gleaming off its towers. A city filled with learning and wisdom and joy and laughter, an idyll wherein strife never entered. And then calamity struck, an earthquake, perhaps, killing half the population and maiming the other half, shaking everything that made up the city down to its very foundations, leaving cracks that will never be repaired, toppling the observatories we’d built, certain that, together, we were close enough to heaven to see it.
And the days have blown in like sand, settling at first finely, then more thickly, bringing softer curves and gentle veiling to the jagged shards and twisted metal of a city destroyed, and only the injured and weak remaining to effect any kind of rebuilding. And as the days continue to drift through, they will eventually fill in and bury the city. What was once a tall spire will become a dimple in the desert. But the city is still there. Everything that made it beautiful is still there, and all evidence of its destruction is still there. It doesn’t go anywhere, and if the wind is just right, it will blow away the sand that has filled it, and the ruin of a former life becomes visible, the wind whistling poignantly through broken windows.
It still stands, this city, though somewhat less proudly now. It survives, but the blowing sand will take the shine off of it and put a creak in the remaining hinges; it will make it harder to walk its streets. There is a weight on all things, even the beautiful ones, and you have to strain a little to see them, and use your imagination to see them as they once were.
It is still inhabited, but by ghosts. His, and the ghost of who I used to be with him.
I am doing the best I can; but some days that’s just not very good.