Ronni
Well-known Member
- Location
- Nashville TN
It’s been three months.
I still cry most days at completely random times with no idea of the trigger. But now it’s mostly quiet sobs to try and relieve the constant ache in my heart, rather than the anguished, frantic keening of a mortally wounded animal. I’ve gained back the weight I lost, and maybe a bit more. I should weigh myself I guess. I need to start exercising again, need to get back to walking, to care about my health. I’ve been waiting for that to happen. So far it hasn’t so I may have to force it, because as a senior good health can decline really fast if it’s not supported. I just….I haven’t yet found the motivation to care.
I look and act normal. I laugh and joke some, have conversations that make sense, can get through most days without losing it to the point that I shut down and I can’t function.
I look and act like the person I was before Devin died, and yet I am so completely, irrevocably changed, so fundamentally different in ways that are almost impossible to communicate. I feel like a disabled person, someone who’s lost a limb or lost the use of their legs or can no longe see, some kind of disability that makes it impossible to return to the way things were, to pick their life back up just the way it was before the disability.
An essential part of me is missing and results in chronic and unrelenting pain, and that part will never be returned to me, and the pain will never go way. And so I have to figure out how to craft my life around this disability. The same way that someone who’s lost a limb can never get it back, so too is there no returning to “before” because the before I’ve known for my whole adult life has ceased to exist for me.
I’ve been told I’ll heal, with time. That I’ll eventually climb out of this pit of depression and despair. That I’ll get past this. That life will get back to normal. And from the outside looking in, my life does look relatively normal again, it does, no denying it. It’s the internal landscape where things are so fundamentally different.
Healing implies wholeness, the process where something becomes sound and healthy again. But I have lost a child. My son is dead. The chasm that has left in my psyche, the wreckage, the carnage of that to my soul, is irreparable. I am slowly trying to forge a different life around that fact.
And though it looks like it’s gone back to normal on the outside, what’s actually happening is that I am reaching out bit by bit from inside my grief and loss, from the bottom of that pit of despair, and working on building a new life from within that pit, a life that I’m forcing to expand, to fit the parameters of my now, to encompass the enormity of my grief, so that I can function from inside it.
The grief and loss and pain doesn’t get any smaller, it just doesn’t. So the challenge becomes forcing my life outwards to the point that it can surround and encompass that pain and grief and loss. It’s some of the hardest work I’ve ever done and I don’t know if I’ll be successful.
So when I can finally get back to being social again, when folks see me, and I’m acting relatively normal, most will assume I’m over it, I’ve moved on, I’m healed, things are fine now. They’re not. I’m not. They never will be. It is not, and never will be that simple. I’m just doing my best to function from inside my grief, because I have no other option.
