February 19th, 2013
The times have changed rapidly since last March when my wife died, and man, do I need to learn to change with them. I’m not talking about me acting as if I am some kind of Neanderthal and not evolving with my environment. I mean in everyday life.
In everyday life, I see others go on with their day-to-day activities. For instance, the people in my life are transforming themselves into the current times that life has brought them in today’s world since last March. In a sense, they are going with the flow or rolling with the punches, so it seems, at least, by the looks of their smiling Facebook photos. For them, the year is just another year filled with their own trials and tribulations. But now it is time for me to man up and get on board or fall behind even further. I need to come up for air eventually.
I have stood on the sidelines long enough, and now I have decided to engage in life and begin to roll with my own punches. Not that I haven’t made my moves after my wife died. I have done things to get myself going because if I didn’t, I probably would have just gone insane. The fun stuff I did with my kids as therapy for them probably helped me as much as it has helped them. But as a grown man, I need to do more for myself.
I always told Mimie that no one cares more than us about what goes on in our lives. No one cares about how we live. How we struggle. How we moved on from the loss of our twins or any other thing, no matter how mundane our issues became. And now, I have to heed my own advice because if the past few months have shown me anything, no one will help me or my children. My loved ones want to pretend everything in my life is getting better. What do they care about my struggles? Spoiler alert: They do not.
It’s not that I’m lashing out at anyone in particular. It’s just that people have their own problems, and after the initial shock of my reality entering their world, the window of sympathy and understanding is only open long enough until that person decides to shut it. Then you are on your own.
And I am and have been on my own.
It has been a struggle for me to get reality in check. The medication and therapy are starting to work, and the once-hazy path to clarity has begun to come into focus as the fog lifts. Or perhaps this newfound cure will only last for a month before my window shuts, but I know I need to strike while my character is strong enough to embrace my life today.
Other than my therapist, my blog has been instrumental in keeping what has occurred in my life organized. And it has brought a therapy all its own. In addition to my blog, I have privately documented my struggles and, at the same time, being as honest in my public writings as possible without being committed to some facility where I would probably wind up for hours in a white padded room with absolute sound proofing, all the while being peered through some window where doctors would take notes of my behavioral attributes that would later be documented in some medical journal for all to study. As you can see in that statement, my imagination can get the best of me.
I remember I was once afraid to write this blog because I thought I would be too vulnerable and possibly appear weak until someone put writing my blog into perspective this way: “Vulnerability is good, because it allows others to see that we all have struggles in life.”
I embrace vulnerability because it breeds honesty. Everyone in my world needs to hear this because those who love me suck and have failed me and my children. Without this honesty about who I am and how I feel, it will cause me to bottle this emotion up and create resentment. Sweet, sweet, bitterness, and anger. I may have gotten lost somewhere along the way without that organization of my thoughts. Someone who had read this and found it helpful may have felt alone without knowing that we all struggle in this life.
I know my blog has helped someone move along in their own personal journey of loss. People have reached out and told me so. I hope that in that helpfulness, I may inspire and nudge them enough to see that there is life after the death of someone they love. It is about time I subscribed to that same medication talk, took a dose of my own medicine, and finally got on board the life train or found myself becoming derailed. It is time to see the life that has eluded me as the days gone by. Because those other lost days gone by are gone forever.
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