Grief Stricken

Years and years ago, when someone experienced a great loss, they wore black for a year to indicate they were in mourning. Clearly this is no longer a fashion choice, but I wish there was a way to show that the grief of losing someone that takes up a huge portion of your soul has not ended because a certain amount of time has passed.

I lost my mom in 2013 to cancer. It took her life in three years. She fought it and she fought it hard. I've never known anyone sp strong. She was frightened of death, but she refused to admit it. I was terrified of losing her and, even though I tried to work through some of the grief I would be feeling after she was gone, I still was devastated when the loss finally happened.

For the first few months, I was numb. I didn't understand where the pain was and the hurt and the crying. Why wasn't I falling apart? And then I read her journal on the first anniversary after her death and found out. My grief and pain were hiding behind a protective layer of "this didn't really happen; she's coming back." Grief is not logical.

My mother was an incredibly important part of my life. I talked to her almost every day, no matter how far apart we lived. She had a special relationship with my kids, especially my youngest, who has autism. She died when he was fourteen and his memories are fading. But I have emails they wrote back and forth. I have her words on paper. I find old emails she sent me. Those words are my connection to the only mother I will ever have.

When I go to the cemetery (which is not as often as I want to but going is SO hard), I don't pray to God. I don't know God. We weren't a religious family. We followed Christian values, but we weren't church people. So I don't know what I believe. Something started the universe and that has to be a force beyond reckoning. But I don't feel that presence is following what each and every one of the 6 billion people on earth can possibly be interested in what is going on in our little lives.

When I go to the cemetery, I "pray" to my mom. I talk to her like she's still here. I tell her how angry I am at the cancer that killed her. I tell her what's bothering me. I tell her how much I miss her. I tell her how proud she would be of her youngest grandchild. And I ask her to let me know somehow that she is proud of me.

I found a birthday card that she sent me a couple of years before she died. Her handwriting in it says that she and my dad are so proud of me. I want that handwriting tattooed on the inside of my arm. I want to see everyday that she believed in me, even though I have such severe mental illness and most days can't even cope with going outside. The illness gets worse with age, not better, because I have bad reactions to the medications that would make it bearable. So some days, I am mostly white knuckling it.

She would have been 77 on March 2. She had so many more quilts she wanted to make. She wanted more time with my dad. She wanted to see her grandchildren grow up and see how much my youngest was able to accomplished.

I know if she is still here in some way, she is very proud of what my autistic son has achieved. And I hope she would be proud of the work I have done to get every single benefit available to him to help him become a contributing, independent member of society. He has been my full time job for the last 16 years. That job will end this summer when he leaves for college. And I'm not sure who I will be then. I hope my mom can somehow guide me.

Mom, I wish you were here. Five years is just too long. And the more time that passes, the more bitter and angry I am that cancer took you away from me.

I still need my mother.

The Perfect Storm

Still feeling pretty low, but I see a faint glimmer at the end of the very long dark tunnel of this depression.

It always helps to have a good friend who "hears" what you are saying and can give you validation. That helped more than anything else I have tried in the last week. I dumped everything that was bothering me on him and he wrote back with complete understanding. We've got to have the exact same personality, which is what made us great friends and awful romantic partners. I guess opposites really do attract, but sometimes you need to know just how much you are heard by someone who works the same way you do.

Hubby continues to recover from his brain surgeries and that is hard on both of us. The loss of hearing in his left ear has made it difficult for him to process the mass of information that is coming in to his right ear. He has short term memory problems. The problem is that I am a talker and he is not. And my constant talking makes him very tired and confused right now. It hurts that I have to curtail how much I need to talk to him, because having bipolar can make me extremely chatty.

My friend mentioned that I am a "talk to think" person, which means I talk to work things out in my head. My hubby is a "think to talk" person. He works things out in his head and then he only says the bare minimum of what needs to be said. I don't know how our marriage has worked for thirty years, but it still works. i guess when you've been through so much and survived. And thirty years means a LOT of shit you either go through together or you get divorced.

I had the perfect storm on Wednesday. I had to drive 45 minutes in the rain on the interstate with the the 18 wheelers, who use that as their main method of travel north to south in our area. I am petrified of driving after my accident in 2015, when I broke my back. I have slowly managed to be more comfortable behind the wheel, but my ADD makes me a distracted driver and that scares me more than I can say. The energy I need to put into a drive like Wednesday inevitably brings on a panic attack.

The clinic where my shrink works is also an addiction recovery center. It's usually full of people and it's noisy. I spent a year coming off of a strong narcotic last year and the struggle is truly real. I am incredibly lucky that I have come through the other side and don't need any further treatment. After almost overdosing last April when I ran out of one med and went into suicidal withdrawal and a desperate attempt to get myself to sleep with another prescription almost killed me, i decided the number of meds I was on was unacceptable and dangerous. So I weaned off several medications with the help of my doctor and my therapist. It appears that I'm not the classic addict, since I haven't had the desire to go back to the drug I went off of and I no longer abuse my other pain medications, which I admit to doing on many occasions in the past. It's under my control now. I'm so very lucky.

But...being around other addicts who are discussing everything about their addiction is very much a trigger for me. And a path to an immediate panic attack. I usually take my earbuds with me so I can tune people out while I wait, but I forgot this time. And I had to wait for about 15 minutes after my 45 minute drive in the rain with the killer trucks.

It was horrible.

I've been posting in a facebook support group for about a year and they have been amazingly supportive. But there are several recovering addicts. I had posted a quick post about not having my earbuds and how the clients in the office were upsetting me. If I had thought that one through, I would never have posted it the way I did. It was a quick post that I was having a rough time with the situation and apparently it came across as judgey. Totally NOT meant to judge. But it upset people in a group that has saved my life and the fact that I upset people I really like had me so depressed I didn't know what to do.

Then I drove home 45 minutes with the trucks to get home. (Anti-anxiety meds, anyone?)

When I got home and check FB, I realized that my group was exploding over my post. So, I deleted it and apologized profusely. Because that's who I am. I apologize for my very existence constantly, so the fact that I offended anyone cuts me to the core.

I'm stepping back from Facebook. Just for a bit.

Between that and the five year anniversary of my mom's death on March 12th, my best friend's birthday was on the 13th (she died six years ago of breast cancer at the age of 36), I've been functioning at a low level for a couple of months.

I've been grief stricken for weeks and trying to hold it in because my mom would hate for me to sit around crying over her being gone, but it is what it is. Maybe someday, the grief will become bearable. I don't think so, but I know time has a way of blunting horribly sharp edges.

All I want it to not let go of the grief because I don't want to let go of my mom. I feel that if the grief stops, so do my memories of her. And she will no longer be here if I let it go. So I can't let it go. Maybe someday.

I have been busting my ass trying to get my autistic son ready to move to an assisted living situation two hours away to get complete and total support with his daily living skills in an independent apartment and an autism support program to help him with community college, I feel like I've been hit by a truck. It's a full time job right now that I will soon be handing over to the support people where he will be living on July 1st. But right now, it's almost all I do.

I talked to my mom every day before she died. Between losing her and my best friend, living has been just hard. They were the two most important women in my world. And finding other women I can relate to has been hard. I'm finally making some progress, but my agoraphobia and social anxiety make it tough.

I think I'm going to the cemetery today. It's finally sunny and somewhat (?) warm.

Spring, where are you/

Adulting and Depression

Image Courtesy of Allie Brosch

Mind dump of current feelings.

Fear
Sadness
Grief
Pain
Rejection
Judgment
Hurt
Anger
Depression
Anxiety
Lonely

All of these, plus I can't stand the thought of leaving the house to go get my prescriptions. Why does everyone think that people with anxiety and agoraphobia are capable of going outside and driving somewhere? It takes me hours to psych myself up to leave my house every single day.

Even though there is a lot of new information and knowledge about mental illness, it is not accepted as a valid reason for not being able to do the simplest of things or for being too sick to work or miss an appointment. How many people come up with false medical reasons to give when it's really our chronic companion, mental illness, that is making us seem like we don't want to or can't; And even our mental illness professionals will charge a fee for same day cancellation. How can a mental health professional not understand that sometimes, we just can't and yes, it IS all in our head?

 Assumptions by Mentally Healthy People:

• You must be lazy if you can't go out or don't hold a job (because you must not want to).

• You must be weak if you can't just pull yourself up by your bootstraps (because depression is something we do to get out of things).

• You must be antisocial if you don't want to go to that party (because social anxiety isn't a real thing - you just don't want to go).

• You must be unreliable because you agreed to that thing two days ago, but now you can't go (because it couldn't possibly be that social commitments are really, really hard and we can't always keep those promises because social anxiety).

• Why are you still crying when you lost that important person so many years ago (because grieving should only last for a certain amount of time)?

The question that haunts me the most is why mental illness is considered a weakness and and excuse to get out of things we probably don't want to do? If we could just go outside, exercise, eat better, do it anyway, all of our problems would just disappear and we could act like actual people.

This advice makes me so happy. Now I know what exactly I'm doing wrong and you've told me how to fix it. Congratulations. You just cured mental illness.

The struggle is real