depressed much?

i should smoke some weed i tell myself. escape this empty room, this empty everything. but, i don't want to. what i want, is to submerge myself in an even greater void. i want to drown myself into nothingness. i want to pull these blankets of darkness over my head and just wait it out.

the anger is back, together with the apathy. grief - a merry-go-round of unpredictable stages i thought were going to come and pass chronologically. that's what we've always heard. the stages of grief - they are a,b,c,d, and e.
no, they're not. not in that order, anyway. they come and go and come back and go, only to return again.

live in the present moment, i read over and over again. don't look back, for it is in the unchangeable past and don't look into the future because the thought of his absence will drive you mad. just focus on the present moment. pay attention to the details. that's how you stay in the moment.

the present moment.
it is midnight. almost the strike of.
it is an unusually mild march evening
i open the window and lean out to take in a breath of fresh air
i close my eyes - the night's scent reminds me of a nyc summer evening
i remember sitting on the fire escape with J, smoking cigarettes, talking.
*stay in the moment, dammit* .. NO memories now.

i walk into my children's room to retrieve my younger daughter's tooth.
she has lost it today and it is under her pillow waiting for the tooth fairy.
it's a molar. that's two dollars. i take the bloodstained tooth and save it,
even though i really just want to throw it out. i can't.
i take my time to carefully cut a pretty ribbon
and wrap the dollar bills like a gift.

the present moment is over.
i don't know what to pay attention to anymore besides the empty room.
i don't want to do anything. i just want to submerge myself in nothingness.

mysticism explained?

this morning, as i stood in one corner of the room, quietly  getting dressed, a picture, which had been leaning against the wall, sitting on my dresser across the room for months, suddenly slid forward, pushing off a glass candle holder, which then shattered on the floor.

as i walked over, puzzled about why that happened, i noticed that behind the picture frame were a bunch of drawings by my daughters. the one on top was just J's name in big, fat letters and lots of colors, filling the entire page. something my younger kid had painted for J when he was away.

as i swept up the shards on the floor, i thought about how one could now interpret this. yes, it could just be a total random thing. this stuff happens. but, maybe it was J - saying hello ... or being angry that he can't help relief this constant sadness i now carry with me.

and then this made me think about how mysticism works... or maybe works. everything that happens to us or around us can probably be rationally explained somehow, even if we don't have the capacity to do so. however, i think, the whole point of the mystical is to be subtle. maybe, the other dimension is allowed to give us small signs but they can't be too tangible, for it would throw off our concept of reality and probably drive some of us insane. things have been happening this year in a way they have never happened before. many of them could be coincidence or explained away with some stretch of the imagination (or sense of what's rational, that is), but how would that help me? it wouldn't. and that's why the signs are subtle. so that we have reality to hold on to if we needed it - but also the option to see and appreciate the comfort of something else besides this bleak existence of grief.

unproductive grief

... sometimes, I close my eyes and just imagine he is standing right in front of me. i keep my eyes closed and imagine the birth mark on the nape of his neck, the shape of his ear lobes, the feel of his short hair, ... i imagine tracing the tattoo on his arm, i imagine putting my hand on his cheek. ... it's a moment of bliss and peace...although, i'm not sure it's productive to be doing this kind of thing...since i'm supposed to be moving forward and through this grief. it's been a year ... i think, i should be trying to cultivate behaviors that encourage acceptance not melancholy and nostalgia.

mystical night-time travels?

a few months ago, my old watch died and, out of my junk drawer, i dug a watch my great-aunt had owned .. for about five minutes, that is. My mother had bought the watch for her aunt but when she presented the gift (a fairly expensive, water-proof, Esprit watch), my aunt told her to keep it; she already had a watch, she said. when i heard the story, i had to chuckle. it was so typical of her. she was always very matter-of-fact like that. last year, my aunt passed away. she was in her early eighties.

now, i have been wearing that watch for a few months and every night it loses about ten minutes. i wake up in the morning and it will display 6 a.m. instead of the actual time of 10 past six. it doesn't lag during my waking hours, keeping up with the day's pace. but at night, when i sleep, something seems to happen.

last night, J's daughter slept over - together with his mom. when i finally went to bed, i thought about how nice it felt to have them here and how much love i have for this little girl and his mom.
when i woke up this morning, my watch was two hours behind.

i am probably going to have to change the battery, eventually ... but, sometimes i'd like to imagine that the reason for the lost time is of a more mystical nature. i like to imagine that, when i am sleeping, i travel away into another dimension to be with J. he has been in my dreams a lot lately .. maybe this explains it. ;)

it's liberating to let your fantasy go sometimes. why do i have to keep reminding myself that his body is in ashes and that he'll never walk by my side again? i am always so morbid about that loss of him. i should entertain the mystical more often.

visions of anger

positivity is a choice, my 'Daily Grief Affirmations' email tells me. you may not be able to control how you feel - angry, sad, etc. - but, you choose whether you look at things or act in a positive manner.

made me feel guilty, when i read that.
lately, i have been letting my anger take over. i'm angry everywhere and at everyone.
it's strange, for one of the attributes you could have never really ascribed to me in the past would have been anger. maybe there were sporadic, fleeting moments of frustration but, raging anger, not really. or, at least, that was my impression of myself. nowadays, i notice that i am mad a lot and that realization just makes me more angry.

sometimes, i sit in the car and i just want to shake my whole body and scream until my lungs burst. i envision myself like a cartoon character, indulging in this primal expression of rage. i imagine how my body pulsates and rattles like a steam pot which is about to explode. i imagine my head shaking from side to side as if someone has pressed an invisible fast-forward button to speed up my movement until i shake in an uncontrollable and surreal convulsion.

Original image by Jesse Lefkowitz

closure doesn't trump grief

i heard a story on NPR today (can't find it online, yet, but here is a similar story from the New York Times). I was shocked to hear that "heroin-related deaths increased by 84 percent in New York City between 2010 and 2012". If I remember correctly, the reporter mentioned that more people die of heroin overdose in the city than are killed in car accidents. (I have to double-check on the latter once the story gets posted online).

i was going to share this story with J's mom but then i remembered that she gets upset when anyone (his younger sister) says that he died of a drug overdose, even though, we both saw the autopsy report. he did have heroin and cocaine in his system.
thinking about the stigma of an overdose - (is there a stigma?) - the question sprang to mind, whether the medical examiner wrote the cause of death as "natural" because she wanted to spare our feelings. the report mentions the drugs and excessive alcohol in his system, but - apparently - that is not what killed him, or is it?

when i drive by the building he died in, i wonder about the police's sincerity, too. i wonder if they put "no fault" on the report just to save themselves from the hassle of investigating yet another "hoodlum's" death. i'm sure, that's what they thought of J, lying there on the kitchen floor in that house full of small time criminals.

i also contemplate, whether it would make any difference if i confronted the people he hung out with that night. when i identified his body, he looked like he had been beaten up. i have been told all kinds of stories possibly explaining why he looked the way he did, but somehow i find all of them hard to believe. he looked like he had been in a fight. also, one of these guys took my credit card off him and used it until i noticed, over a week after J had died. or maybe he exchanged the card for drugs. i don't know. i think, i've already written about this... but ... it continues to haunt me .. that question of what really happened that night.

and when i find myself wondering about all the facts surrounding J's death, i usually end up chastising myself angrily. who cares what happened?! .. it doesn't change the irreversible fact that he is gone. doesn't change a thing. closure doesn't trump grief. you will continue to be f-in miserable without him for a very f-in long time, and that's that. just deal with it. why do you have to go bark up a tree now, probably get yourself in trouble? you have kids. focus on what's important now. finding work and caring for your children.

unfortunate fates

today - 16 years ago - i entered my first marriage. i was 23 years old and had not the slightest suspicion that the man i was marrying wasn't the one. i loved D. i was crazy about him. but, only later in life did i come to learn the true meaning of these words. love and crazy.

today - one year ago - i said a final good-bye to my soul-mate, J. i loved him so much, i would have died for him. i was crazy about him. it may be a cliché, but, addiction is a term that most adequately describes the way i craved his presence. my heart and reason wrestled each other constantly, for in my mind, i knew that he was trouble and that i shouldn't love a man this unstable. in my mind, there shouldn't have been forgiveness for all the missteps he had taken throughout the course of our relationship. but, in my heart, forgiveness and love for this boy seemed infinite.

**

as i was driving back from dropping the kids off at school earlier today, i found myself - as so often - overwhelmed with tears. i hate this even more so in the mornings, when i am surrounded by so many faces. it's embarrassing not to be able to control one's composure. especially when, in general, you would consider yourself a fairly stoic person.

**

my tears usually lead me to prevention strategies. since i hate crying so much, i would like to figure out how to do away with this sadness. as i sat in the car, staring at the snowflakes which had just started to fall ... in fact .. now that i think of it ... the kind of snow that was falling was exactly the same short flurry that surrounded me when i went to buy J's urn and later, when i picked up his ashes, together with his sister. it was only a brief, very light snowfall, which seemed to have appeared solely in response to overwhelming grief, and back then, made us think of J. ... life can be mystical sometimes.
or, maybe it was just the weather.

Photo: www.flickr.com/photos/hernanhernandez/

anyway, as i sat there, a man walked by, struggling to push a cart overflowing with cans up the hill we were on. after my first thought of sympathy (how much it must suck to have to collect cans to make ends meet, at this early hour, and in this cold weather), it occurred to me that this could have been one of J's more depressing fates, assuming he would have not made it out into complete recovery. and then i had the idea that i could maybe take the time to write down all the potential lives i could imagine for J. only the bad ones, for the good ones would probably just make me sad and full of regret. i assume, J wouldn't be very happy about this exercise, but i'm thinking it may help me with feeling less sad about losing him. this, of course, is a rather cold and calculated statement but i am desperate. i'm also aware of the fact that this is something you probably should not do. thinking negatively about a person who has passed. you should remember the love and the good things, they say. but, what if it is more therapeutic to imagine scenarios that would have driven us apart? granted, there was hardly anything he could have done to make me not love him, but, maybe some of these unfortunate imaginary lives are going to take away pain by creating anger. .. now, that i am saying this out loud, it kinda sounds like a bad idea. replacing sadness with anger is really just another stage of grief and thus, is still grief.

but, i think, i'm gonna do it anyway. just to see what happens.

damn hormones?

I'm beginning to think that my emotional roller coaster of grief is strongly correlated to my hormonal state of mind.

It's peculiar that I am always interested in finding patterns but can't actually ever remember details to confirm a pattern. It's always just a hunch. For example, if I would like to figure out whether my emotional sensitivity is related to my hormonal balance, wouldn't it make sense that, at one point, I would start recording the weeks during which I am unusually prone to more than average depression and then examine where I am in my cycle?

I would also like to know why I am feeling better today (and this week) than I have felt the week before, during which I spent most days in a depressed haze, crying my eyes out, at least, once or twice a day. Could it be that my kids returned from spending most of the mid-winter school break at their Dad's house? Are my children saving me from complete rock-bottom? It's possible. Because, even though they can be demanding, annoying, frustrating, and just a whole lot of teeth clenching work, they are the sunshines of my life. I realize, that sounds a bit contradictory (and kinda corny) but the mothers among you will understand. Parenting is like a love-hate relationship. Fulfilling and draining at the same time. I have said it many times - without my kids - I would not have survived this year. And I do not know how parents, who have lost a child, go on living. I would just want to die. It is the only thing I can think of that is worse than losing your partner. I would take any other strike of fate over that. ... (Note to God: please don't strike me anymore this year... please.)

**
Before the kids returned on Sunday, I got myself downtown to, at last, engage myself in some gallery hopping. I've been wanting to go for months. J and I used to go often. What I didn't calculate was the fact that J was not part of this life anymore and how this may affect me. As I went on my trail of galleries, surrounded by clusters of people - nobody alone, it seemed - I became more and more depressed. I missed him so much. Memories everywhere. Finally, on the way to one of my favorite places, the Aperture gallery, I turned around on my heel to abort this awful afternoon. I needed to get back to my car before I had a nervous breakdown in the middle of the street. Alas, I did not make it.
I had to duck into a building entrance to release my tears and I pulled my scarf over my face because I was so embarrassed. I was just standing there, helpless, sobbing. When I finally got my composure back, I walked to my car and, just before I got in, I heard it. The cooing of a mourning dove. At first, I thought, I made it up. But then I heard it again and I exhaled. I hadn't heard a mourning dove since the weeks after J died, almost a year ago.
The next morning, I woke up to a mourning dove cooing at my window. Just as it had woken me every day in the week after J died. I felt comforted but also self-conscious, in a way, because it probably meant that my sadness was so powerful in its energy that it seemed like I needed an intervention from beyond (or wherever).

Now, my rational brain is wondering whether it is maybe just the season for these doves? Perhaps, the mourning doves are appearing because it is almost March and that's when they return to this area.. or, at least, that's when I last saw them. Maybe I didn't notice them ever before because they had no real significance to me ... but then I have to remind myself that I have always loved the sound of a mourning dove and, I think, I would remember if I heard it before - because I so rarely have in my life. ... The only time I distinctly remember hearing the doves was when my grandfather died. But, knowing how faulty memory can be - maybe I'm just making this up in my head. Maybe I heard them much more often than that...