The bad days

There are good days and bad when you’re dealing with grief. Everyone expects it at the start. “I’m so sorry.” “Condolences.” “Take your time.” It’s now been a month and a half since I found out. A month and three weeks since his death. Some days it barely affects me. Others are like today: everything — every little thing — is a reminder and a show of his absence.

The word games are gone. Silence is overwhelming and seems to seep into the emptiness I bear inside. I want to reach out to others, but I’m also reluctant. Nobody can fill his place, so how can it help? And the few times I try, talking to others, the sound of the voices only irritates and makes it all the more clear that he was special, that these things I wish to say were for his ears. Nobody else can help. Nobody makes it any better.

I’ve had conversations aloud with his ghost. No, he’s not there. I don’t imagine his spirit lingering for me or anyone else, but I do imagine his reactions. His laughter. His concern for my tears and my difficulties in dealing. Those “conversations” have made me cry more. And laugh, too. I don’t know that they help, though, because at the end, I realize I’m still alone and he’s still gone. I’m left swathing myself in isolation and grief. But who else could understand how I feel, truly? What we had was ours and nobody else’s.

I try to play the piano, but the notes come out wrong. It’s been so long and my fingers aren’t as strong as they once were. The songs aren’t so ingrained in me as I thought or else the music doesn’t quite fit. Too cheerful. Too dark. I plan to practice more and to get better. He never heard me play, but I wouldn’t want him to hear me play as I do now. I’ll work on it, just not when I’m seeking something from it.

Aimless, I try to become productive. To soldier through. Except, what do I know of being a soldier? Still, I try. I feel that to lose the uniqueness I treasured in a person means someone has to make up for it. Someone has to ensure that the eclectic and strange thoughts we used to share still come out. Somehow. He’d want that.

Right now, it doesn’t make me feel better, but perhaps, someday, it will. 

When I lost my best friend

When I was a little girl, I never had a singular toy that I required to go to sleep. No security blankets for me. In fact, my favored stuffed toy had been a sewing project of one of my mother’s friends with multiple squares of different fabrics paired and stuffed with plush and sewn together. I loved the bright colors, the textures, the feeling of satin on one side and terry-cloth on the other. It was sewn to be a snake. I called it Boa and would convince adults that my parents allowed me to have a pet snake. Granted, I also convinced adults that my parents, in a good-hearted gesture and eccentricism, had rescued an elephant from a questionable circus and erected a barn behind our house to store it. I liked feeding it peanuts. Adults were stupid.

Now I am an adult. It is my great fortune I’ve never met a child quite so odd as I was for I don’t know how I would react. Possibly invite her to tea and send her home with books. Possibly throttle her for being a precociously presumptuous snot. I have no children. This is my choice, not for lack of a situation that would permit it. I refuse to listen to the people who say “there is no right time” and “let the rest of life take care of itself.” I don’t have to be subject to your poor planning, just because I have a need for financial and emotional stability for any progeny I bring into this world. And if my biological ticking time-bomb doesn’t comply, I have no issues with adoption. Half of my family was raised by someone other than their parents and this produced my experience.

Perhaps it is this independence that has shielded me for so long from the eventuality of losing that person I spoke to every day and shared everything with. Best friends, along with anything else. Funny and bright, young and vibrant, we had a connection that seemed fresh and special. Private and personal, we didn’t share what we had with anyone – why should we? It was for us. When I asked his opinion, he’d tease me with, “Don’t you already have it?” We understood one another. Soulmates, in spite of the fact he was younger than me.

Shortly after I had a flu, so did he. We questioned if it had been passed through our computers, since he HAD offered me chicken soup through his monitor to make me feel better. He was beset with several days of, as he termed it, “blerghiness.” When he grew quiet, I was relieved – he was resting up, healing. Every day, I left him a bon mot. Every day for a week.

Like the unwanted intruder, Worry jiggled the latches and crept into my heart. My soulmate was an adult, so what if he was diabetic! I’ve had plenty of friends who have been diabetic and have kept it under control. He was careful about what he ate. We had talks about recipes and diet and besides, he was perfectly lucid when we last conversed. Wasn’t he?

Worry’s partner in crime, Fear, found the cracked window and pushed it open, chips of paint falling from the ancient sash and leaving a musty smell of dust and old house to tickle the nose. Cursing the way the detritus stuck to his blacks, he left the remains of his passage lying on the floor at the front of my heart. My messages were paired with other means of communicating to him and joined with sheepish admissions of concern that something bad might have occurred. But, privacy. In this age of internet, even if we were friends, privacy is something sacred. Were these intruders, these malfeasors, really worth my disruption of our mutual privacy?

Two weeks. Two and a day. Two and two days. Two and three days. Screw privacy. I found the conditional, but local friend, who didn’t know me, but I knew about. When the third thug, Terror, joined the others, I realized that the potential loss was worth the sacrifice. Surely it was all for nothing. Surely I was being a hypochondriac. Imagining things. He was just taking time to heal, right? RIGHT?!

He was 25 years old. He had a flu. He was diabetic. He had died. I found out too late for the funeral. Too late to be at the memorials. I introduced myself to local friends and family, all of whom welcomed me with unexpected grace, but it was too late. I have no stuffed animal to resort to. No security blanket. I have never lost my best friend before. Independence comes with a price.

Sorrow versus Depression

When sorrow enters your world, whether it creeps in with the slow chill of damp autumnal leaves or with the sudden wrenching pain that causes you to double over in physical distress, it is a hungry emotion, feeding upon your motivation, your attention, and your mood. Like a disease, sorrow can go into remission and permit you to function normally. Then from nowhere, it reemeges to strike again, forbidding you from forgetting. But is this grief the same thing as depression?

Depression is a condition, an ailment that has come into a greater understanding across the last decade. It acts in the same fashion as the malaise of grief, but it is known to be a real illness which may or may not be handled with treatments. Those that may not are simply in need of ongoing research and medical advances. There is no such option for grief, because the assumption is that grief and loss happen and are done. A healthy person should feel these and then move on.

But when? How quickly? And is true grief truly ever “overcome?” It isn’t a call to stop living, but when a critical part of your soul has been torn away, leaving a hole, should there be such a thing as recovery? You can move on and find joys and live, but you will never be the same. There is no cure.

Depression finds a victim and stealthily steps in to torment and afflict. There are protections for many. For some, the proper bodyguard has simply not yet been found. Depression remains a bully who attacks again and again, without provocation.  Grief hits hard and fast once, but is a thief. You lose part of yourself that may never be recovered. There is no protection to halt the pain of your injury. You may heal, but the scar remains. You may never walk the same way again, and you never know when the ache of your wound will reemerge. The similarity is understandable, but the difference is crucial to understand.

When loneliness falls

Loneliness falls like silence; sudden, soft and steady, like a thick winter blanket to muffle sound, impede movement and leave you breathlessly dehydrated. It leaves no room for escape and shrouds you even when you bundle it up and travel with others.

Anyone who tells you loneliness is best avoided by surrounding yourself with others or keeping busy has obviously never experienced it. Loneliness is not endemic of an inability to socialize, it’s an issue of connection. The ties that hold us together are such fragile threads and like silken hair that is knotted, it can slide free and slip away without warning. Understanding someone else and truly connecting with them is a stronger link; the connector to a solid chain. Yet even so, that which has been forged may also be rent asunder.

When you lose someone you have truly connected with, the severed link dangles and reconnecting across that damaged chain is impossible. It calls into clarity the quality of your remaining connections and leaves you bereft, no matter how many others surround you and console or sympathize. The loneliness descends and remains with a palpable presence,  forcing a struggle against it for momentum, for clarity, and to free yourself from that binding suffocation.

It is real. This sensation isn’t at all a wallowing in self-pity or a device for attention. It forces you to seek others, to seek repair, but only time can grow or strengthen your bonds and attempts at entire replacement are doomed to failure. At some point, the blanket of loneliness may be lifted, but only when you have bonds solid enough to bear the weight.

Time and Tensors

There are times in everyone’s lives when a change inexorably affects a person. Something simple and small has sweeping and overwhelming impact. When an item is left on the ground, is forgotten, or found, you may find a tug and pull upon invisible threads of relationships tied to that item which causes you to then become a part of a new equation. For example, a bracelet found lying upon the ground may compel you to check if anyone has lost it. You might want it for a girlfriend or someone else, but the original owner may come around, searching. Suddenly you are linked. It may be as simple as five minutes talking to a stranger, it may be a life – long friendship’s starting source.

Tensors. Unfortunately, as easy as it is for this to occur with a discovery, it is equally likely with the absence or loss of an item. When you lose a person, the impact is even more profound.

Grief is only the small part of a loss. It agonizes and aches, but it can only last for so long. The human body is not designed to endure such trauma unabated. At first, it feels as if there might never be respite. I’ve found myself swearing that there could not, even should not be such relief! It is unthinkable, impossible and irrational that it should end. After all, a person is not something you just set aside or forget.

And yet, time passes and the pain eases from sharp agony into an ache that ebbs and flows like a tide. The ache may bring you new friendships and relationships,  but nothing is ever quite the same. The lonely reminders live on. Little notions I want to share have no recipient any longer, so in memory of my tensor, I begin to write.