From me to you. And back.

[stella74]

Hi Storeys (and KG & Dagless), I've been meaning to tell you that I read Joan Didion's book about her husband's death, The Year of Magical Thinking, and I thought of you. Her husband died suddenly of a heart attack and not a suicide but the grief/recovery process is similar.

[15 Storeys High]

I'm stuck in a comatose state where nothing seems to matter, and all there is, is this constant monologue in my head, the feelings that I can never stop thinking, and the world is passing me by. And I should do something but I don't do anything because I don't have much energy to expend on anything except lying in bed thinking and attempting to sleep. I'm living in a world which doesn't really seem to have any room for me anymore, as I watch people get on with their daily lives, and friends make other friends besides me and I push people away so that I'm alone on the outside looking in, because it's a hard place to be, and they should be on the inside looking in rather than standing beside me. It seems to me that I'm going insane, slowly losing my mind, but then I think that I'm not because I'm so passive, in such a stupor......a state of numbness that I have finally achieved so I can't possibly be going mad. Wanting to throw myself out of the window, or something less messy like swallowing too many of those pills the doctor so wants to give me seems like perfectly normal behaviour (although I also know that it doesn't). And I apologize for this ramble, this atrocious misuse of words, this waste of words to convey.....well...nothing really. I wouldn't be surprised if you cast a glance, roll your eyes and think for christ sake pull yourself together, because it's what I should do, except I can't. I'm grasping around for the edges that are supposed to define me, and I can't find them, and there's no one left any more to pull me together because I've pushed them away. And I don't think I've ever written anything so stupid and rambling. It's probably just another sign of how I'm on the edge once again, having settled there with my sleeping bag, knowing full well one movement will tip me over it and then it'll be over, and I'll be headed towards another breakdown and the difference between this time and last time is that no one will be there to catch me and it'll all be over. Whatever. It's hovering inside me, clawing its way, trying to get out. If I know any type of truth right now, its that I'm a fricking timebomb. I'm too god damn stubborn to break in. Honestly, I'm a circle around the digression, around the inevability, around the stupid planet. Seriously though, I havent moved an inch. My mind is still at square one, because adding more on is too much. This must be the insomnia talking now. This can't be me. This isn't me anymore. With the pounding in my head and the silence in my ears, I can't breath, I can't think, and I can't write any sense. I fell over in the bathroom...just now.....just fell to my knees. My legs gave up like they belonged to an elderly person and my skin burned, melted, and fell to the floor. I think I'm still there. Clenching down on my teeth, with some kind of hysteria coming out of my mouth. And, for a fraction of a second, I felt every emotion that I've been surpressing, and every feeling that I've choked down for nine months. Honestly I thought I was going to die right there on the floor where she did. I froze with a panic beating my heat, swallowed it up, and held it there. And now I'm here. But this isn't me.

[tiredofvampires]

Storeys...

 

Whatever you do, don't ever delete this post. Because one day you are going to look back and read it and fall on your knees, grateful to yourself for not being in this place anymore. Grateful for all time. Grateful for yourself being your strong self.

 

I'm going to PM.

 

Please HOLD ON.

 

(Haha -- did you ever think I could write anything that short? )

[Dagless]

I would never tell you just to pull yourself together. It would be an extremely foolish thing to say. I've tried it, held up the mask for other people to see but it's like tensing a fist, you can't keep it up for long.

I've sat, alone staring at the wall as my mind screams and I felt like tearing the flesh from my bones but I just sat there in silence.

 

All that inside you, it is only yourself. A part of you that want to show you things and feel things because it has to. The more you push it away, the more secrets you keep from yourself the more weight you have to carry and pull you down.

 

All the pain that you feel, all that pain inside you is only there because you love her. Just keep remembering that and letting go of the pain doesn't mean letting go of the love because that will never leave you.

[15 Storeys High]

When people have a wound, sometimes it heals all wrong....incomplete. The edges heal by themselves instead of forging together like they're supposed to, and they leave the hole with no chance of closing. The gap can't be filled. And they're left with a hole in the most literal sense. I don't know where my edges are but they sure as hell haven't closed over my wound. The only thing that you can do is rough up the edges again.....a wound upon a wound...and give them the chance to cling to each other and try again. That's what I need.....I need a little roughing up. So maybe this is all good.....maybe this is my roughing up.

[Dagless]

Sometimes on the way to healing we get stuck and it takes a realization for us to continue again. Sometimes these realizations are extremely painful but they must be faced if we are to heal and move forward again.

[CallingAllAngels]

Storeys,

 

I am sorry for what you experienced on the bathroom floor. Sounds surreal, and I'm sure it felt surreal. I am hopeful it was a break through in the right direction, with you getting some of the pain out on that jagged wound that hasn't yet healed right.

 

PMin'g you now...

 

~Allie

[stella74]

Storeys, there is no timeline for healing. Trust in your ability to heal, even when it doesn't feel like you're getting anywhere.

 

Remember - two steps forward, one step back...then another step or two forward again.

 

Hang in there.

[tiredofvampires]

And I apologize for this ramble, this atrocious misuse of words, this waste of words to convey.....well...nothing really. I wouldn't be surprised if you cast a glance, roll your eyes and think for christ sake pull yourself together, because it's what I should do, except I can't...And I don't think I've ever written anything so stupid and rambling.

 

I think you should try out a radical new idea, just as an experiment: that everything you say, everything you put down here from this point forward has value and importance. Even if you don't know what it all means at the time, that it's coming from needs and the strivings of your deepest self for wholeness, for finding the edges. And that along the way, there are some really unrecognizable things that could crop up, but that they exist for a reason, all of them. That nothing appears in your thoughts and feelings without there being a damn good reason and that everything about what you're going through is part of nature. Nature, our nature.

 

I think Dag's post couldn't be more perfect. And I think this is just where it's at:

 

All that inside you, it is only yourself. A part of you that want to show you things and feel things because it has to. The more you push it away, the more secrets you keep from yourself the more weight you have to carry and pull you down.

 

All the pain that you feel, all that pain inside you is only there because you love her. Just keep remembering that and letting go of the pain doesn't mean letting go of the love because that will never leave you.[/font][/color]

 

And so maybe you can start to contemplate actually not rejecting these parts of yourself? Actually entertaining the notion that you owe it to yourself to feel everything you are, without apology, without disavowing, without telling others to scoff at you for it?

 

Those scoffing, punishing voices that frequently crop up in your words -- about people telling you to pull yourself together or saying that we will roll our eyes -- that is actually you imagining other people thinking the brutal and harsh things you think about yourself. This is what's known as "projection" (which you probably already know) -- where you project your own thoughts about yourself onto someone else. You imagine others must be thinking what you are thinking about yourself, but it's only your own voice berating youself and has nothing to do with what we would be thinking about you. This isn't even a rational process...you know we all love our Storeys and want to hear everything that is going on, whatever you have to share with us. But that voice is still there, and that's "your" voice.

 

I actually put "your" in quotes because I don't even think it's your very own voice. I think it's a voice you adopted as your own, but it's really a much older voice belonging to someone else that influenced you at some impressionable point in your life. That's how it is for everyone, me included, who has this kind of thing going on to recover from...we don't get born thinking, "I am so full of crap, who would listen to this drivel?" That's something that gets in there somehow over the course of a lifetime. Our original voice says, "I belong here!" and accepts without question that people will want to hear what we have to say. That's why little kids will just fearlessly come up to you and say the most guiless things in the most self-confident tones. They don't even question their right to be sharing their minds and what the content.

 

I mean, I ask you: would you read another person's distress on here and "roll your eyes" and think "for chrissake, pull yourself together"? Is that how you'd view/feel about someone else in trouble, or would you feel concern and compassion? You've got to ask, "if others deserve that...don't I?" And treat others and yourself the same. I know though that sometimes that can feel like a real leap...but there isn't any reason you can give me that you should be treated with any less kind regard than anyone else here.

 

Even if you have moments where you do find yourself rolling your eyes impatiently with someone else, chances are even that is another face of projection, because you are directing at them the feelings you'd have for yourself. It all comes back to that...

 

So working with your own self-perception...it's really tough stuff...but this is a really great place to do that...

[Dagless]

There are two quotes that really helped me through. One was "It's not a time to be strong, it's a time to be human." And even though to be human means to laugh and smile and feel love and joy it also means to cry and hurt and to feel agony and pain.

The other may sound silly but is a quote from Rocky Balboa. I was never a fan of the Rocky films but Lisa loved them. We went to see it at the cinema together and I ended up buying the box set, so I guess you could call it "our" film.

Anyway he says that life can hit you hard, harder than any man "but it ain't how hard you can hit, it's about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward. How much you can take and keep moving forward."

I must have watched that clip a hundred times.

 

And that's how I saw it. Life had just hit me so hard that it would be a long time before I could even stand up again never mind move forward.

I couldn't fight back. There was no fighting with this one, just feeling and it being ok to feel as bad as I did because I am human.

 

I don't know if any of this will help you, I just wanted to share.

[15 Storeys High]

There has got to be something left to uncover, or something more to understand. There has got to be a reason, as to why? I'm just waiting for the gap in my chest to be filled, or the void in my life to close. It's not a good thing, that all I feel is unquenchable anger when tears fall from any pair of eyes that aren't mine. How the hell do they know? How the hell do they cry for these useless things that mean nothing? There's a time bomb beating in my chest, and I'm either going to combust into flames or rip it out with my bare hands. It’s not good, and I don't care. Whoever said there's beauty in the breakdown, what freaking breakdown were you watching? I went to her grave, and it didn't bring the comfort I thought it would. Instead all I saw, was every conversation and memory cemented in a stone. I saw the entire life I knew frozen in stone. I saw her smiling face crumbling into dust. I thought it would be different, but it just hurts. Hurt is dry, and black, and it rests in your throat like ashes. It’s swollen and cold, because every light has dimmed down, and the entire universe is shaking. And I’m somewhere, staggering hopelessly between every useless analogy that I make on what, in reality, feels like a crashing building in my bones. I‘m angry, and contained, with an eerie calm. A calm before a storm. Maybe. A calm before I regain my sanity. A calm before I blow a building up. It’s a serious possibility. I can’t even fathom keeping up the pace, when all I want to do is crawl away, and into myself. I'm angry at that damn god everyone claims has blessed them so gracefully, when all he has ever given me is crap. I'm angry that he couldn’t pick out some worthless person to be bestowed with this crap. I'm angry that I don’t believe in God, and I have no one to blame but myself.

[Dagless]

You shouldn't blame yourself. Never blame yourself. If you had of been given any clue to what was going to happen don't you think that you would have done everything in your power to change it, don't you think that you would have moved heaven and Earth to stop it?

All that anger that's coming out, it can't be pushed down and contained. It will come out one way or another. You have every right to be angry Storeys. Angry at the world, angry at a God you don't believe in, angry at everything you can't change.

[CallingAllAngels]

As hard as it is to bear, I believe it's good that this anger is coming out. It simply has to at some point. It cannot stay bottled up inside you forever.

 

I hope you are staying real close to Dean and his family at this difficult time.

 

~Allie

[KG]

Storeys,

I think the anger is seeking a way out, coming to the surface. Go outside and break things....branches, beat on boards, chuck stones into a lake...let it out.

Can't tell you how many things I broke....It has to come out.

Just don't hurt yourself in the process.

[15 Storeys High]

Nine months ago I walked into grief, and people say there was nothing I could do about it, but I don't know. This past nine months will never be remembered as the year anything beautiful happened. I won't recall any of the hundreds of revelations and laughter I encountered. And it won't be the nine months in which I proposed or got married.....For all of my life, for all of eternity, this nine months will be embedded into every cell of mine, as the last year I had real love. There aren't any words that could ever accurately portray any of this. There's only the feeling of complete dread. I want the world to mourn, and I want to extract every word in every language so there's no definition of pain, or grief, because no text does them justice. Maybe I wasn't expecting the finality of it all, or the ripping absense in my chest, but it’s there like lead and it’s permanent. All things do not heal in time. There's no healing, there's no acceptance.......only loss. I think it’s the silence in my home, or the screaming in my head. Maybe it's how as the seconds roll, people just seem to understand less and less, and my understanding for people lessens as well. It's how time bears absolutely no meaning and the concept of it has washed away. I swear yesterday was tomorrow, and today never happened. I swear no matter how many times I'm told, I can’t wrap my mind around it. It felt like one hour, even though everything jumped and jolted, I swear it was real. It all went from nine at night until three in the morning in a flash. And then it's how seven in the morning came so fast, and how the day dragged on for a century. It’s been nine months, but it might as well be two days, and without a calendar it would be.

[Dagless]

The heart knows no time. Life has away of just pushing us along and we never have the chance to stop or slow it down and sometimes we are left thinking "how did I get here?". I've never known time act the way it has for me this year. January felt like a year in itself but the rest I have no idea where it has gone

[KG]

For me...16 months went by crazily. How did it get to be that long without her? It was just yesterday we were on the couch, watching a movie together, sure she was sick, but we were together. Life stunk, but we were together. Our son was here, we were a family.

Now it's an emptiness that prevails...from the mundane...laundry, no dresses to hang up that special way she liked....to the hardest, the empty side of the bed.

I have no idea where March, April and May of 07 went...or where I was when they were here.

Now it's July of 08, and she's gone, and we're here without her.

[tiredofvampires]

You do not have to think about accepting this. You don't have to think about remembering anything beautiful that happened in this abomination of a year because this in fact has been the year your whole world was stopped in its tracks, frozen, yet sent into a kind of furious motion. The fury is everything that rises to the surface for a few moments and then dips back down into the depths, leaving you just with tears as the marker that they are all there. You don't have to know the person who cries them. Just allow that they arrive and fall. You don't have to try to combat anything...the force of a storm gathers on its own because nature lets it. Let it. Let it all. You don't have to try to find words for such immense atrocity that is happening inside because you are right, there really AREN'T words at a certain point that are strong enough. (Even though your words are so powerful to me, they have me transfixed.) But you know, there is a saying in the culture of my birth which says, "When one person dies...the whole world dies." Bah, you say...people die every day and each is in his little box of hell who survives the loss of a beloved. But you see, what you're feeling is something the world has never been able to describe and yet because some people have known it, too...people have tried. They've tried because even though it cannot be expressed in words and is so way beyond explanations, it has been lived through again and again and again...and it's too powerful of a secret for anyone on this earth to try to keep in. That it is very REAL and that...it's what makes your insanity sane.

 

These currents of anger...rage...are moving like tectonic plates below the surface which is just that black and grey and ashen hurt. The hurt, as suffocating as it is, is a soft bandage compared to the rest, I think. Let it be. It's moving and just be present with it because this storm is supposed to be. As Dags said, feeling angry at what you can't change, feeling rage for the things that started this year, 9 months ago, a violent energy towards a godless god and why and why me and why her and why us and why anybody really...since no one deserves this, least of all you...

 

That's got to make itself known. It's too big not to. What's inside you is bigger than a storm, it's everything you know, want, wanted, can't control in this life when you get born. When we are born, we are given a little chit of paper that says, "Good luck out there. I make you no promises." And that's something that's just so unfair, it seems. In fact, it almost seems like a cruel and sadistic game.

 

I am glad you put in that you wish some worthless person might have had this instead...because that means you know you are not worthless. Your life is having to contain the uncontainable, but above and beyond the movement of the tectonic plates, there is still you. You still have you. Even if you don't know where you are now, you are there. So however your emotions start to gain in force and intensity, know that at the heart of the storm there is still the eye. That eye is the person you are who is worthwhile, blameless, innocent and pure of heart. And will be standing vigil through it all.

[stella74]

Yes, it's good the anger is coming out. Do you remember when KG smashed all the dishes? The anger is your psyche's way of moving forward. Use your anger as fuel. Try to release it constructively. I think I had suggested this to KG - I found it helpful to go driving in my car and scream at the top of my lungs so no one could hear me. Your body needs to release the anger somehow. It's a physical release, like crying.

[CallingAllAngels]

I am in agreement that time does NOT heal all wounds. And the world does not stop for our sorrow. The sun rises, and it seems ALL SO WRONG. People go about their daily business, smiling, laughing, and what right DO they have????? Seems they have no right.

 

Time does not heal all wounds. Time just changes us.

[tiredofvampires]

Time does not heal all wounds. Time just changes us.

 

I really love you for saying this, Allie. I agree with everything you've said here and think this line is so very true.

 

Someone who I really respect, who has written, spoken and taught a lot about grief (and meditation) wrote, "We live in a world where everything changes...Whatever you want, the more you want it, the more there is a kind of grief, a sickness, a hollowness in the pit of the stomach.....Grief comes from trying to protect anything from being what it is. From trying to stop the change."

 

The essential nature of existence feels like an outrage.

 

But our lives are sort of like clay that is always being shaped into something else. That is also a part of life.

 

 

 

I also wanted to say that I'm really sorry to hear that your experience this time with visiting her grave was not a good one. That you felt as bad as you did. I remember you went one time before, a while back...and had some of the same reaction, only it seemed at the time less so than now. And my feeling is...now that you've seen where she is laid to rest...perhaps it might be a good idea not to visit there again for another very long time, until quite a time has passed and you can bear to see the gravestone. Your reaction really echoes things I've felt myself, in front of a headstone...and I think it can be just simply overwhelming to try to see the totality of a person "limited" to the physical definition of a grave marker. To be quite honest, I have a bit of an aversion to visiting the grave of loved ones for this very reason (though I don't have many close ones to visit yet, fortunately), or of anyone for that matter. Because this man-made remnant, chiseled and inscribed and standing there so inanimately cannot possibly represent the person. To me, it emphasizes all the wrong things -- being compressed into a small place, being separated by the elements from us. And this is a bit of a delusion if we are taking it literally. Which is what happens when I see a headstone -- the person's spirit suddenly becomes whittled down to the tangible physical remnants that I see in front of me, which are so barren of all that wide, expansive and very much alive spirit that inhabits my heart and mind. I don't want to see anyone reduced, confined this way...and so I fully empathize with how you felt that way.

 

And so I'd have to say...maybe you should ask yourself if you feel like going there to visit for "her sake" or "your sake"....who you feel that you are serving by visiting during these very painful and raw times, for you. Because if it's for her that you are going, to honor her...maybe it's just too much right now to "honor" her in this way. And I'm wondering if you might find another way next 8th and many to come, to "visit" her and feel her near. I personally like to light candles and allow that warmth to represent their smile, their being, their light in me. There is something about a stone that is so....cold and fixed. It's not the right way to see someone, I think. Unless you have been able to assimilate their spirit in a way that feels more whole to you, wherever you are and apart from the materiality of what appears in front of you.

 

There may be a time when it is more tolerable, to be able to hold the true vision of her without it being "crushed" by the stone. But I'd say, you will know when that is, in the future...and I think your heart will be bleeding just a bit less by the crushing weight that is already so hard to bear within you. So maybe it would be good to give yourself a long break from going there, knowing that you are every single day visiting her. (And, she is visiting you).

[chasey]

15

I cried all the way through your post. I can't imagine going through that much pain.

 

*HUGS* for all you've been through and for being brave in letting this out.