purgatory

I'm still staying with my mom.  I went home for a couple of days, got promptly overwhelmed again, and left.  We got our water issues resolved (read: had to buy a completely new water pump and tank), but my house smells weird to me.  Like garbage or something.  Rotting, stale life.  The clutter is out of control.  Just walking through the front door I get this overwhelming urge to turn on my heels and just run.  My temper runs short now and I just want to remove myself from it all.  I guess that's what I've done by going to my mom's.  If I'd stayed home much longer I think you'd have been able to hear my bones snapping from the weight of all the grief, pressure, and anxiety I've been bearing this summer.

I've had houseguests for the past five weeks (yup, you read that right).  My tiny, 1000 square foot house has hosted Hubby's parents (who have since departed) and now his sister and 21 month old daughter.   Which of course makes it the optimal time for my water system to go kaput and for me to have a major emotional breakdown over Sunrise's death.  Major, as in both my husband and my mom wanted me to check in to a hospital or go to a doctor and get medication.  I wanted neither, but I couldn't argue with them forever about it either, so I agreed to go see our family doctor on Monday.  Wish me luck.  I feel like such a weenie having to go to someone and be like "I'm sad.  Can you give me some pills?  Do you have any anti-sad pills?  Or better yet, any anti-stillbirth pills?  Or how about time-reversal pills?  So I can go back and do things differently.  Will my insurance cover those?" 

I talked with my therapist about this.  She asked me what I wanted to do, what I thought would help (aside from medication).  I said I just want to be alone, even if just for a weekend.  To be in solitude.  To maybe do some writing, to look inward, to gain insight into this grief.  But ultimately, to be alone. 

You'd think that would be a simple thing, and it is, but it's like most people can't seem to wrap their heads around it.  They want me to be around others, so that I can listen to people being happy and telling me not to be sad.  You know, I think people really believe that will help.  "Think positive, Dejah.  Look to the future."  As if my life has become a slogan for NASA or something.  As if by forcing a frozen smile on my face after a time I'll start to believe it.  I'll recover.   I won't be sad anymore.  I'll be able to function.

This does not help me.  Maybe it helps some grieving mothers to be around people, to have others to distract them and give them pep talks and tell them everything will be okay.  This does not help me.  I'm very reserved, shy, and introspective by nature, and doing something that would be considered out of my comfort zone on a good day is certainly not going to help me on a bad one.

I can only assume that people say these things because they feel that if they leave me alone in a room long enough I'll start looking for ways to kill myself.  But I'm depressed, not suicidal.  Believe it or not, I haven't lost my capacity to reason or use logic.  Who would benefit from my death?  No one.  And as fierce a mama as I am to Sunrise I am an even fiercer one where D. is concerned.  I'm not going to leave him to negotiate this world without me.  I may not be able to guide him right now, at this moment, on this day, but I know that he gains much from the simple fact that I am here, and I am his mother.  Even if we're not in the same room, the same house, the same town--he knows I'm here.  I may be willing to punch God in the face, but I would never, ever hurt my son.

Ultimately, I was naïve.  I was wrong about grief.  I thought the worst was over.  I didn't realize it would drop on me like a ten ton weight out of nowhere, crushing my spirit and leaving me emotionally incapacitated.  I didn't realize there might actually be a day where I would willingly remove myself from my son's life because even his sweet, joyous spirit wasn't enough to pull me through a particularly hard time (not that I'd want him to be a crutch for me; this is not his burden to bear).

One other thing I've learned:  I understand why so many marriages end after the death of a child.  My husband has been nothing but patient and kind to me, and I still have a hard time connecting with him on this issue of grief.  In the beginning I felt our grief was out of sync, yet I also felt that we were both on our way to healing.  Yet as each day goes by, he moves on more quickly, and I get left further and further behind.  It's like I can't even reach him anymore.  For him, it is not a problem to have our niece stay with us for three weeks, it doesn't make him think of Sunrise.  But in my head, the associations between what I could've had and what I ended up with are too painful.  When he holds our niece, and plays with her, all I can think of is what a wonderful dad he would've been to our daughter--and whoosh, there's that heavy darkness on me again.  There I am, running away, my grief simply so overwhelming that I don't even bother fighting it.  I simply run and hide.

For the first time in my life, I feel like I don't know how anything will end.  I feel so uncertain right now.  Will I recover enough to function as I did before?  If I do, can I expect this grief to hit me again at some random point in the future?  What can I do to stave it off?  Or is it futile to think that I can do anything about it?

It seems to me that grief is grief just as death is death: final, sudden, lasting, inescapable.