quick, short, sharp shock

It went away for a while - the pain upon awakening.  Then it came back recently.

It's different now - kind of a quick burst that spreads quickly.  Not quite the gut-wrencher of before when I would have the moment of anticipation before it reached its deepest.

My depression has gotten worse - this is perhaps its physical manifestation.  Or just existential terror.

fiction

So, I've been writing. It's going better than expected. I've discovered the secret to fiction - the story line is made up, but the details are real. Go ahead, laugh. Yes, I've been reading for forty years and I never quite got it till now.

I don't know if I can follow the story line he wrote. It's too foreign to me. What I'm doing is using it as a platform to go back to his childhood. To tell it from his perspective, without sentimentality.

It has a life of its own. Hopefully, it will find a shape, just as the other one did.

Life after death

Boredom really does yield fruit. Being stuck in the house for a few days and not being able to start a solid read, I think I finally found an answer to what I am meant to write next. I've had the title for a few days but I had no idea what it would be about. I knew it would be fiction. It will not be about my life after his death, but about his life after my death. It will be the novel he wanted to write. It will be the life he should have lived.

Après moi, le déluge

I so wish this could be the end of the world. Then it would have all worked out for the best.

survival

"All the time that I’d been thinking, I cannot continue to live, I’d also had the opposite thought, which was by far the more unbearable: that I would continue to live, and that every day for the rest of my life I would have to live without my mother. Sometimes I forgot this, like a trick of the brain, a primitive survival mechanism." 
The Love Of My Life
Cheryl Strayed

That piece of writing touches on almost everything I have experienced with grief.  Except the acting out.  I haven't been bad.  Not in any recognizable way anyway.  I have stuck to duty.  I have been mean maybe, impatient, but not self-indulgent.  Do 2-3 cigarettes a day count?  In the magnitude of my loss - hardly.

So is this it?  Have I overcome?  Have I healed?

"Healing is a small and ordinary and very burnt thing. And it’s one thing and one thing only: it’s doing what you have to do."

Done.  But it doesn't feel done.  It feels like everything might still fall apart at any minute - my carefully constructed ordinariness.  My body that feels as strong and fit as ever, with hardly a wrinkle marring my brow.  Surely this can't go on.  I will wake up one morning and not recognize myself in the mirror.

"Somewhere, floating on the surface of my subconscious, I believed — I still believe — that if I endured without her for one year, or five years, or ten years, or twenty, she would be given back to me; that her absence was a ruse, a darkly comic literary device, a terrible and surreal dream."

A surreal dream made all the more terrible by the lack of outward change.  I want to see the monster in the mirror.  

birthday

27 years ago today I didn't sleep, because I was becoming a mother.  Typically, I tried to cheat and dozed off between contractions.  But you were coming fast and I had to rouse the snoring nurse next to me to tell her it was getting serious. 

You were so big, they had to cut me, but you came out perfect - round-headed - a little white bunny as the nurse called you.

Last night I slept, but in my dream I worried that you had dropped out of school, and about what were the options to remedy that.  Then I woke up and realized I needn't worry about you anymore.  I miss the worry.  That was my gift.  I'll take it.

2 dreams

I don't dream of him often, but when I do I feel like I was really with him.

This one was the other night: he came home with a tattoo on his face - temple and forehead.  He had tried to cover it with makeup and I started wiping it off.  Something about 20 or 22 days, to do with Sudan.  He was 17 by my calculations and this time I didn't let it go.  I marched him to the tattoo place, which was in an apartment, like a doctor's office and threatened to sue them.  They didn't seem too perturbed.  Then he was in a hospital bed, presumably to have it removed.  He was really skinny, his ribs were sticking out of his chest.  He wasn't mad at me, but I felt bad about causing him additional pain with the removal.

This one was five weeks ago: I was with him and it was now.  I think my mother was there, too, but we went out, me and him and this is the only part of the dream that I remember.  It was dark outside.  We went to a girl's house.  Everything was kind of dingy - the place, as well as our clothes.  He was wearing something like pajama bottoms, or loose thermals - two layers of them.  At her place, the girl had some white powder out and she casually snorted it.  I thought it was cocaine.  He had some, too. I didn't, but I didn't try to stop him.  It seemed like it was not a big deal.  When we left, the bottom of the wooden staircase was blown out, so we had to get down from the first landing which wasn't too high, about chest-level, but I wondered how we had gone up.  Then we went to some kind of club.  Before that, I noticed that he was now wearing pants, but I was wearing the pajama bottoms and I thought it would be best to change.  I had my yoga pants and I thought that would look more decent, but I ended up wearing jeans under a dress.  When we got to the club I thought they were going to ask us for IDs and I realized I had left my wallet behind.  I told him that and he laughed and said "don't worry, I have money."  They let us in.  The club was kind of dingy, too.  He seemed at ease in this world. I felt it was a place where I could be with him.

longing

I felt some yesterday for the first time and it wasn't for the past.  It had to do with the crisp autumn air and I felt it in my legs.  Of course, I wanted to kill it, because I can in no way satisfy it.  But it's a sign of life.

Anniversary

I think the animal in me has gotten used to missing you.  I no longer wake up every time with a spasm of pain in my gut.

From now on I shall no longer mourn you.  I will only celebrate that I knew you, that such a force of life came through me.  Through the tears I will be grateful for being granted the privilege of loving you.  And I will try to deserve the love you gave me and the trust you had in me.

a brick wall

That is what I hit any time I think of the future, any time I have a fleeting hope, any time I try to get around it somehow.

calm

I've been holding up so long, it's like I can't feel it anymore. Wondering if the floodgates are bound to break.

"You are what you pretend to be."

my room

Here I have known the worst pain in my life. And yet I'm grateful for it. I trust it to contain my pain. Here I find oblivion, and sometimes dream. But even if I lie awake in agony, at least I lie awake alone. I have no one to answer to. I don't have to put up a front. In my room I can let the longing and the obsession do their worst. No one has to know. Here they lie in wait for me. Here they keep me company.

non-existence

That is perhaps the hardest pill to swallow. I can deal with the sadness, the regrets - they mean that there once was someone, someone who occupied my thoughts. But as Kurt Vonnegut says in Mother Night:

"There's another clear moral to this tale, now that I think about it: When you're dead you're dead."

So all my thoughts can't benefit anyone. I might as well forget. 

And another one - for the survivors:

"I was like almost everybody who came through the war. ... Every job was a job to do, and no job was any better or any worse than any other."

evolution

"I don't want what you want, I don't feel what you feel."

So this book I've been reading is a bowl of laughs. Its premise is that there is no purpose to life, it's all an illusion perpetrated by adaptation to make us get out of bed, and if you can't deal with it, there's Prozac.

Here's a quote from it:

"Introspection can't provide a good reason to go on living because there isn't any. ... But introspection keeps hoping, looking, trying to find a reason to go on.  Since there really isn't one, those who look hard eventually become troubled."

Troubled is a nice way of putting it.  The first quote is a lyric my son kept coming back to, so much so that he joked he would have it tattooed on his forehead.  I said in my book that he wasn't well-adjusted, that he couldn't be fooled.  He saw through the meaninglessness of it all.   He didn't buy into the whole getting out of bed for no reason but to perpetuate a bunch of molecules.  Of course, any body wants to keep going, but he fooled his by driving it to death.  No, he didn't will it, because there is no free will, but he slipped one by evolution.

natural selection

My son joked once that when he grows up he wants to be natural selection.  I'm reading a book about it now and wondered if he was defeated by natural selection - his traits too rarefied, too unfit to perpetuate.

I once planted flower seeds that a friend had brought me from Holland.  I knew nothing about it and planted them in pots that were too small.  They grew tall but never flowered because the stalks broke - they were too tall and fragile to survive.

nostalgia

This is a new phenomenon for me. I find myself gripped suddenly with a longing for the past - any past - not just when my son was here, but even before that.  Any past time in my life now seems idyllic.  Even last year when I was undeniably depressed.  I want that back.  Anything but this, anything but now.

Our Dark Knight

Download it at Smashwords

absence

"the hours after you are gone are so leaden..."  Samuel Beckett, Cascando
"All the years keep rolling/The decades flying by/But ahh, the days are long..."  The Walkmen, On the Water

I can deal with the years, the decades without you. It's the individual moments that can break me. The void is too much to bear. My love is going into a black hole, never to be returned. I am slowly turning cold.

mourning

So I had a crisis after I finished the book. At first it was about the reaction to it and thinking of maybe having to rewrite it (which I can't and won't do).  But really it was about not having it as a nightly ritual of grieving.  Where to channel my grief now?  Can I let go of it or will it come back with a vengeance? 

The pain I get upon awakening has been a little unpredictable lately.  Sometimes I don't get it immediately.  Sometimes I look for it and that provokes it.  Other times it skips me.  Then it comes back as usual.  That is also something I've been clinging to, I think.  Without it, what do I awaken to?

This morning I had an intimation.  I woke up thinking of him.  It's strange that people think the photos of him covering my walls would be a constant reminder.  They are not. I don't need a reminder.  What was different this morning is I caught a glimpse of the endlessness of despair.  I have been telling myself that grief is forever.  Today I felt it.  The finality of it.  Every Saturday I will wake up to nothing to look forward to.  He is not just away for a while.  There is no substitute.  There is no way for me to rejoin him.  Even if I die.  We die alone.  He died alone.

audience

When it comes to writing they say the deeply personal is also the most universal.  I think that applies to my story, as well.  I know it has the power to shake people up.  I think my critics so far have been too close to be objective.  I will try a couple more, who are not that invested in my well-being.