This Time, Last Year
On Dec. 7, 2006, I wrote:
Though I feel alone most of the time, it’s simply not true as there are people all around me all the time. And when pressed to rely on them, it is amazing to learn that they come through. I’ll be damned: people might just come through for you, if you allow them.
In response, I have to say that today I feel mostly alone, and I do not feel people around me. No one counts on me right now, and I count on no one.* Will people really come through for me if I allow them? This presumes that I’m somehow not allowing them… isolation is one of the byproducts of grief. I cared so much that now maybe I need a moratorium on caring.
Granted, I have a cold and am feeling a bit puny. But the sheer weight of loss and grief has crowded out any of the usual caring feelings I have this time of year. And the interesting thing is that I am really ok with that. I haven’t really asked anything of anyone. The dishes get washed somehow, the laundry cycles through, the groceries get bought, the floor gets clean. How long can the lawn go without mowing (this is still an issue in Dallas in fall and winter)? Christmas decorations need putting up. It’s getting done, though. I’m doing it all. It would be nice if someone came and offered. However, organizing enough to ask for help is too much effort. In my grief one year and one day since my father fell ill, ten months since his death, I am moving through Jell-O. Right after his death up to June or July, I was moving through concrete. This is improvement.
What I have gained from plodding through concrete is the intimate awareness of my own mortality, of my own survival instinct. A baseline, as it might be called in medicine or statistical analysis. I have hit bottom – the very very bottom of the abyss – and it’s not so bad here or a few dozen feet up from there. Even at such a low point, there is room for creativity – to see how to improvise, to do what needs to be done with least effort, to do things in a familiar and comforting way, or to actively not do something with impunity.
Rather than having a network of people all around me who care for me, and whom I care for, I think the revelation today is that I can be utterly alone – devoid of all the family who cared, who mattered to me – and I am ok. Not great, not soaring, but ok. Even with a cold. As a song by Jimmie Dale Gilmore goes, “even when you’re lying with somebody, you have to go to sleep alone.”
*However, it must be said that I am not really alone. I have this wonderful child in the other room, watching Friday afternoon cartoons, enjoying the freedom of having the weekend ahead of him. Even two points can make a circle of caring. At my fingertips, I have the bloggers and emailers, and the phone-a-friends who continue to keep in touch despite being flung to opposite sides of the country. It’s a gossamer web of caring, and maybe right now in my grief here just a few feet off rock bottom, that’s all I can handle.
This sums up really well exactly how I feel too. I lost two brothers and a niece in just 7 months and I think I am at the jello stage, too. It all started about 14 months ago.
Some days I go back to concrete, but not too often. It helps to write. It really does. Keep doing it, you do it well.