May 26th, 2012
No two people grieve the same, I think. Its been a few months now since our loss. Every time I think I am getting better, I fail. I just need a cure.
I still wonder though, if this is how it is with everyone who mourns. The ups and downs of feeling good about yourself. You can go a week or so, and feel your pulling through the darkness, and then fall right on your ass, twisting your body and lay flat on your damn face. It’s grueling. You feel like your living in an enduring black hole. The good weeks feel like a tease. An appetizer before the sorrow is served.
I’m going through the motions of life day in and day out, but the only difference is my daily routine is not of my choosing, it is my necessity. No matter how I feel, my boys need me. Some mornings I wake up to a vibration in my head and it rattles the oxygen right out my brain, cutting off my blood supply, and a light headedness kicks in. Even though I feel lightheaded, my head bobbles around like the weight of the world is shifting from right to left, and then back again inside of it. But I ignore it. I use the surrounding furniture to hold myself up as the dizziness tries to take me down. It must be the heartache I feel everyday when I look at my boys.
To cope with the heartache, I imagine she is on a long vacation. I say to myself, “ Well, if she was in prison, she couldn’t see the boys.” But even prison would be wishful thinking. The ironic thing is, I am the one in prison. I'm trapped in this labyrinth, unable to chose the right path to follow, to make my escape from the deep corridors inside myself. I’m in solitary confinement, a box, attempting to break out.
The need to heal is imperative and I know I have to try but It feels as if I am an addict of some kind, an addict of self pity. If you talk to any junkie or alcoholic in their great moment of clarity they will tell you to your face, “I need to stop this shit, I need to get better. I am tired of living this way.” But those moments give way to their demons and the habits they formed are now ingrained in the fibers of their bodies. Their habits eventually returning to them, with a vengeance. It causes them to relapse, into total destruction of their heart, body, and mind. My self pity hasn't reached those levels.
I’m not even close to being a junkie. I have never even tried a drug. Not even marijuana. Not to say I am the Sandra Dee of society. The reality is the only time I came close to even smoking it was with a hot blonde who was the classic, 5 foot 7 inch, blue eyes, and one-hundred and fifteen pounds. I was sixteen at the time. Her mom called to her from the front porch to their house, as we walked in her cow pasture, to come home, the moment we were going to light it up.
My drug is ingrained into a larger organism besides my body. The roots extending beyond my fibers, beyond me and intertwine into my children. Grief is my drug, like the largest organism on the planet the Aspen trees. But it goes beyond land into the oceans stretching across like the great barrier reef. My grief is real, it's alive. If there was a way I could attach myself to another large organism like the Blue Whale as it passes by to get the grief process flowing and out of my body, I would. Those are moments I long for.
Yet, it seems I always allow those moments to pass me by.
Moments are presented to us all the time. Most of us will seize them. Other times, you are forced into situations that don't define you. Your not special for it, you just have to do it in order to survive. You can try to hide from the issue at hand, but the moment you peer out from under your covers you’ll see it staring right back at you. It wasn’t looking for you. It was there the whole time.
Reflecting on what has transpired over the months. I can directly see how it has effected me and my abilities to cope. The strength in me, has been challenged beyond anything that I can fathom. Life isn’t easy, mine never has been, but I am trying to work through this now. Like any good person would. But reflection causes overwhelming pain. A pain that I wish would disappear with a reappearance of the soul that went to heaven but knowing full well that is something that will never be. The pain of that reality unearths many more emotions.
I feel shock.
The shock still hasn’t gone away. Everything I have ever known and all the things we built together are still here. Not just the children but her things. Her signatures. Mail in her name. Dirty laundry with her essence still on it. Body soap. The list goes on and on. How can this be? This can't be real. It isn’t the denial of it, its real and it is occurring. But how the fuck did this happen.
I am bewildered.
Is this really happening to me? Me? How the hell can this be happening to me. I am a good person. I haven’t received any good fortune that would warrant pay back. No deals with the devil were ever made. I have searched my life to find the something anything that I have done, but nothing seems that bad in my life to allow this to happen.
I feel regret.
Not saying the things I wanted to say. I should have expressed myself more. I long to say I love you. I thought deep down that I did the proper things as a husband, but then, there are things I did that make us all human. The bad over shadows all the good. I can not see one damn thing, one once, of good that I provided, yet I know it’s there. The bad blocks it out, pounding on you relentlessly, blaming you for the loss.
I have anger.
What the hell is going on. I mean really. WHAT THE FUCK, IS GOING ON WITH ALL THIS. My kids don’t deserve it. They are the victims to what is going on. I have to put on a smile everyday and pretend that everything is all right, when it clearly it isn’t. Does that make me father of the year? Hell no. It makes me a parent shielding my kids from the reality of life and it pisses me off that I have to do that now.
I feel sorry for myself.
It isn’t fair that I have to do this alone. Alone in the sense that my partner is not here to help me raise these kids. I can receive all the help in the world from who ever the hell wants to help me do it, but it doesn’t make up for the fact, that in the end, I am alone in this. My kids are alone in this. They are one accident away from being an orphan.
And Selfish.
What about my hopes and dream? My plans, they are gone. Cast aside like trash. The things I really wanted to do, will never come to fruition.
This whole situation is taking a heavy toll on me. It is an organism that reaches out and effects so many other people. I am on the front line, so it is impossible to see who it is effecting behind me, when I am trying to save my own ass and focus on only what’s in front of me.
But I am not naive, and understand others are hurting for me, for themselves. People need to understand that I am in the ring alone in this fight. I know what I have to do. I am grieving in my own way. I just need to find the cure for what ails me.
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The Adventures of Captain Imperfecto/Born Again by Christopher P. Fusaro is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at christopherfusaro.blogspot.com.