Love is forever…One woman’s journey with grief

I have been in a weird place for about 2 weeks now, caught up in emotional weather that seems to be stalled; a stationary front.  I feel that something is just not right.  I feel a sense of unease, and like I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop, though I cannot think of anything in my life that’s likely to be half-barefoot already.  I am restless, irritable.  I’m not sleeping well, and I am usually a champion sleeper.  Last night I took 2 Tylenol PMs when I finally went to bed at 12:30 a.m., and even so, I never did fall into a deep sleep; morning came far too early.  I am not feeling as if I’m inhabiting my body fully, and my normal clumsiness seems to have increased.  Tonight alone, I dumped an entire glass of water down my bookshelf and nearly drowned my computer.  Then I tripped over the fan on my way to get towels to clean up the spilled water.  Saturday I stubbed the pinky toe of my left foot on a grocery cart hard enough to make me suck wind, and that afternoon, I got the same toe on my right foot on a different grocery cart.  

I’ve been feeling anxiety symptoms again, after having been free from them for months.  I’m avoiding some of my usual activities; they just seem like work.  A friend came to town last week, and I couldn’t seem to enjoy being with her as I normally do.  It was nothing she was doing or not doing; it was me.  I’ve been socializing a fair amount recently with people I like very much, but it’s tired me out.  I just want to read and watch movies; I want fiction.  I feel something akin to self-imposed numbness, like I’m self-insulating, though against what, I haven’t the foggiest.  It’s  a less malign numbness than that I felt in the early months of my grieving, but I feel like I’m protecting myself from feeling much of anything, or from thinking too much about anything, but I don’t understand what assault my subconscious is bracing me for.  I’ve even been avoiding journaling, preferring instead to escape into a novel before bed because I know if I get started, at best I’ll be running on the verbal hamster wheel, and at worst, I’ll more than likely become maudlin and  overwrought.  And I just don’t want to go there, because it’s not going to do me any good to rehash it for the nth time, so I avoid the whole enterprise.

Something’s not right.

It doesn’t feel like grief, though I wouldn’t discount it as a possibility.  There was a time when I could chalk these kinds of feelings up to grief, and usually that was truly the case.  There was a bizarre sort of comfort in knowing that I had a valid reason for whatever strange mixture of emotions I was feeling at the time.  But I really think that while the time for grieving has not necessarily passed (nor will it, entirely), the time for assuming that’s what’s going on as a default has.   

The problem is, there is no obvious genesis for this, and while I am prone to occasional depression, that generally manifests for me in a deep sadness and hopelessness, not this tension.  What probably makes me the most nervous is that I’ve felt this way before.  It was the month before A died.  I have no known precognitive powers, no precedent for intuiting the future.  But I knew, after it was too late, that I had been warned.  I knew that Death had approached stealthily along that strand of my life’s web, shaking it with a tremor so slight and so diffuse that I couldn’t even recognize it as a threat until it was upon me, and it was too late.

It is different this time, in that the feeling is less intense, and the heavy sense of doom is not really there (which gives me some solace).  But the rest is the same.  

On one hand, I have to laugh at myself and my pretensions to vague psychic abilities.  On the other hand, I have learned to trust my intuition, and something is just not right.  I feel a disturbance in the Force.  And if it is not that I’m about to lose someone else I love (which is really the fear I’m getting at here), the weird feeling is still there, disrupting my life and my peace, and I have no idea where to begin to get to the root of it.