Love is forever…One woman’s journey with grief

I have been all over the map lately, emotionally, and this post will no doubt reflect that.  You’ve been warned.  I assure you, it’s been even less coherent in my head.

You know how when you’re feeling sick to your stomach, and you just know that if you could throw up, you’d feel better?  But you can’t throw up, and you’re not really ready to stick your finger down your throat, so you just feel crappy?  I have the emotional version of that.  I am pensive, and I am missing him terribly—I can feel the ache in my chest—and a big cry would probably do me a world of good; but the tears do not come, so I have all this emotional stuff churning in my head and heart and don’t feel so well.  I don’t know if it’s the rollercoaster, or if it’s his birthday coming up.  I just know that I’m feeling his absence quite keenly this last week and a half or so.  I suppose I could watch a movie guaranteed to bring on tears, Sommersby maybe, but at the moment I’m loath to manipulate myself like that.

It’s not terrible.  I am no longer in hell; I was, but am not now—those of you who are still in hell, take heart!  Most aspects of my life are in pretty good shape, actually, and I am an active participant in my life again, not just a detached observer.  Which I think makes this knot in my chest from missing him and wrestling with all the same old unanswered questions stand out in sharpest relief.  I wonder if I’ll ever be 100% again.  Maybe 85-90% is the best I can hope for now.  I just don’t know what to do with myself.  I have good moments, even great moments, where I’m delighted with whatever is happening.  My capacity to delight in the smallest things has been greatly expanded, no doubt in gratitude for being able to feel that way again when I thought I never would.  But even so, there is part of my mind constantly narrating the goings on:  "See?  You’re totally enjoying this!"  The "despite everything" is implied.  I often wish I weren’t so self-conscious, that I didn’t have to habitually self-examine, but I don’t know how to be other than myself.

I was sitting at work the other day (okay, I was sitting in the bathroom—at work—but that’s where I do all my best thinking), and it occurred to me that I will never not be the girl who lost him. The thought came to me almost in exactly in those words.  For the rest of my days, that reality is mine to keep, along with the ramifications that go with it.  Nothing can erase it.   Of course, I knew that, but sometimes there are things you know without paying much attention to them, and then one day they strike you with a clarity so crystalline it takes your breath away.

"The rest of my life" stretches and contracts in my mind depending on the day, and some days it seems a ridiculously punitive amount of time.  And then the dark laughter comes from the part of me that thinks I will die young:  It could be tomorrow, and wouldn’t that be funny?  I have no choice but to live in the moment, because I don’t really believe in tomorrow anymore.  I understand the concept, like I understand the Tooth Fairy.  There’s a theoretical tomorrow, and I’ll still call and make an appointment for a massage later this week, assuming I’ll make it.  But I am constantly aware that I may not.  A day will come for each and every one of us where we don’t make it home that night.  Is it today?  Is it 50 years from now?  The level of uncertainty in which we must exist in this life is so extreme as to be intolerable, don’t you think?

E and I have been talking a lot about retirement and estate planning, which involves a lot of speculation on whether you’ll die early or late.  You’re gambling on your own longevity—good times.  I’m the one who believes that if you bring an umbrella it won’t rain, but if you don’t, you’ll get caught in a deluge.   So if we sock away a good retirement nest egg, I’ll die at 43 and never get to spend it.  If we don’t, I’ll live until 97, no doubt in poor health, suffering the worst poverty in my golden years.  I’m still bitter enough to think the universe is just that perverse.  I know it doesn’t mean it personally; it’s just where I’m at.  I’m shopping for term life insurance, trying to decide at what age will the need to pay off the house and the need not to pay exorbitant insurance rates balance optimally.  I told the insurance agent I just need enough to bury me.  The things that come out of my mouth these days probably shock the civilians.  They would be stricken if they heard the things I don’t say.

I was doing laundry the other day, trying not to have the mental argument with myself where I tell myself that it might’ve been better if I’d never met him, and then hush the half-formed thought because it seems "wrong" to think that way.  I read all the time people who say that despite the pain, they’d go through it all again to have known their beloved, and I don’t know if I can say that unreservedly.  Not now, anyway.  Of course I’d want to know him; he was a wonderful human being and I love him with all I am; but the pain of losing him cannot be quantified, and should not be underestimated.  The price of love has been so incalculably high.  There is no question that that his arrival changed me in many, many ways, all good.  He modeled patience, and I admired and aspired to it.  He made me the musician I’d dreamed of being.   The list is long, and inarticulable for the most part.  You’re just going to have to trust me on that.  But I’m not sure living with this hole in my heart makes me a better person, or that I couldn’t have lived without it.

Because there was no reason we should’ve met, no reason that we should’ve become such old friends instantly, no reason that we should’ve known each other, let alone loved each other.  No reason that anyone could see, anyway.  Our circumstances were far from ideal for having a relationship.  We weren’t looking for each other, but we found each other anyway.  We said so many times that it was kismet.  We said so many times what a tragedy it would’ve been if we’d not met, because we were so clearly made for each other.   But I didn’t get to avoid tragedy after all, did I?  We were so close, so fast, and then he just disappeared.  Why?  What for?  What was the point?  Was it all a giant tease?

I thought about my life before him, or what I imagined was life before him.  The truth is, I cannot remember what I was like before him, or how I felt about my day-to-day life, or how well I coped then.   Maybe I was this impatient, easily angered, and cynical before I met him.  Sometimes I wonder if I’m expecting too much of myself emotionally, and maybe I was exactly this way before.  Which is bad news for me, of course, but I don’t know anymore.  I know that his positivity buddied up with my general good feelings about the world, and I had an ally against my own demons, as well as those of the rest of the world.  My sense, though, is that I had a pretty nice life before I met him, a life I was content with, and probably would’ve continued to if our paths had never crossed.   And while I would’ve lost some things for not knowing him, good things that matter still in my life, I also would not have had the pain of losing him.  And sometimes I think I would make the trade, because I miss him as much as I love him—vastly, endlessly, and beyond words.   I understand the two go hand-in-hand, as he and I did.

But then it occurred to me that I was right—we never did have to meet; it was a highly unlikely event, our finding each other, and yet, it happened.   And so perhaps there was a reason for us to meet and then to part too soon, even if it’s not one I understand now.  It is not the love I would wish to have dodged; just the loss and the pain thereof, but it seems that perhaps I couldn’t have dodged that either.  It is some comfort to me that as the pain slowly fades, I find that the love is as vibrant and strong as ever.  Perhaps that is the lesson in its entirety.

I’ve spent the last week farting around with my computer, and ultimately had to do a full, destructive restore of my laptop.  I was smart enough to back up all my files, including our conversations and pictures, but I didn’t remember to save all my favorite places.  Or rather, I remembered too late, and they were lost.  I know there were things related to him among them, and I was a little sad to lose them, in theory.  But I realized that if I missed them, I could go find them again.  And if I couldn’t remember what they were, how important could they be?  Sometimes opportunities to move forward are presented to you in the strangest ways.  For example, as I tried to remember my daily reads, I did in fact come up with the Google Earth blog, a blog he turned me on to.  He was a GE junkie, and I enjoyed it as well.  But I didn’t go find it again; I only kept it on the list because he read it.  I usually only skimmed the lead, and then clicked right past it.  And it didn’t hurt.  It lost its power as time has passed and I have healed, I guess.

The last portion of the cleanup was getting all my music back online.  Music was the thing A and I first bonded over, and it was always important to us.  It remains important to me, and maybe him, too.  I don’t know how that all works in the next life.  Anyway, iTunes did a haphazard reimport of the library, and crapped out in the Ts, so I spent most of Sunday figuring out which 3000 songs were missing of the 18000 that were supposed to be there, and getting them put back.  I ran across a song from an album I don’t think I ever got to share with him. (We swapped all our music.)  But I remember very clearly hearing it in my car while driving, not long after he passed, and it was so sad and mournful, because I was.  It broke my heart, this little instrumental.  Of course, my heart was shattered at the time, so it didn’t take much.  But when I heard it yesterday, it didn’t seem quite as sad as I remembered.  I’m sure that’s a good sign.

But I’m tired of getting better.  I want to have not been hurt in the first place.  For all my progress and healing, I hate that he died and left me.  I live around the loss, and my life has oozed in to fill the empty places in my day.  But the empty place in my heart yearns for him constantly.  I have missed many people in my life, but not like this.  Nothing like this.

Sometimes the peace steals in and settles upon me, and I can breathe, and I can feel new strength and greater steadiness.  I’m grateful for those times.  Because that’s what keeps me standing when the wind starts to blow and my leaves begin to shake and my newest, weakest branches begin to bend and sway; like now.  Perhaps this is just a spring storm; it will pass.