I have absolutely got to get better than this. It is going on three years now and the depression is alive and well. There has yet to be a day that I don't think of them most of the day. The pain is not as sharp and it doesn't feel like I am drowning to the point of being unable to breathe but I cannot seem to care about anything still.
I wrote this short poem in 1986.
Still I cry.
Someday I will stop.
Unable to feel,
Joy or pain.
And that about sums it up. I am terrified that that will be my truth and my future. When I do stop crying and no longer feel pain it will be because all "feeling" has ceased.
There are days now when I don't cry. Whole chunks of time that I go without crying but it still doesn't feel like living either. There is no enjoyment of the things I used to love. Nothing to look forward to. Nothing that makes my heart glad.
We always planned to travel once we retired and did some before we retired. I have no desire to travel. When we do go somewhere all I can think of is getting back home. I don't enjoy anything about being on vacation anymore. I try. And I go because Donald wants to and it isn't fair to him but I really never want to go and just want to get back home. I planned a week of vacation back in May. I decided to take Donald to Charlotte to the AllStar Race and the NASCAR hall of fame and Hendrick Motor Sports Complex. Figured I may as well do a vacation for him since I wasn't going to enjoy it anyway. I had planned afterward to maybe go to Asheville and to the Gem mines as I always loved rocks and thought I might enjoy that. We went to the race, to NASCAR museum and to Hendrick MS and turned right around and came straight home. Three days. Basically a long weekend and we were home by Monday evening and the rest of the week was spent in the house doing nothing. A week's vacation wasted.
I had a moment of enthusiasm a couple of months ago when I decided we'd create a memory garden for the three of them. We had no graves to go to. We had no stone with a record of their lives. We never saw them and we were not even able to attend the memorial service for Kara or Paxton and it had about drove me crazy. So a memory garden sounded like a good workable solution to the feeling of incompleteness. Then --it got complicated. I lost interest when it wouldn't get finished. I do think it helped Donald to do it though. He seemed to be going at it like a madman working tirelessly laying stone retainer walls, hauling in fill dirt, top soil and sand. He was really dedicated to it - for a while. But like I said it got complicated. More complicated than it needed to be and now it sits. He had surgery. It rained for a month. Flooded the garden and washed the sand under the fence and there is no sunshine for the flowers. And I'm not sure it will ever get finished. So instead of making me feel better, it now makes me feel worse. It feels like I quit on them and it looks sad and neglected now.
"This" is why I stopped writing for almost a year. Well that and the fact that I've lost interest in writing too. I don't even recognize the person that I am today. I'm 30 pounds heavier and cannot seem to get up off the sofa. I feel like I'm committing suicide the slow way - eating myself into a heart attack.
It just sounds like a pity-party and all I do is whine. I'm sick of it myself and I know everyone else surely is. I am going backwards and I don't know how to stop it. I don't think of dying every minute like I did - but I still think about it a lot and since that had gotten better and now it is back - that is disturbing.
I have no one to talk to about all of this. And I finally decided that perhaps the blog was keeping me alive. Maybe it was my friend, my solace, my confidant. Maybe it was helping me more than I ever realized. Maybe I can just sit down and write something. Not something edifying. Not something inspirational. Not something helpful to anyone. Just something.
You have someone to talk to. Any time.
ReplyDeleteThank you.
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