29

20 Jan 2020 11 Comments

by Denise in Addiction, Death, Death of a Child, Grief, Lonlieness Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

Philip would have been 29 today. I’ve read the posts I’ve written in the past on his birthdays. How thoughtful of me. For all the times I called grief a spiral, I thought things like his birthdays, or the anniversaries of his death, would be more linear, with me gaining some sort of cumulative wisdom along the way. This is not true. This, today, right now, nearly seven years later, is the worst-most-hopeless I have been in a long time.

I hate being alive. I HATE IT. This is more than just a today’s-Philip’s-birthday-I-have-the-blues rant. This is about an impossible loneliness I am inadequate to remedy. This is me, me everyday waiting and watching and hoping that this night, this night when I fall asleep, my nightly prayer will ring true:

Now I lay me down to sleep

I pray the lord my soul to keep

I pray to die before I wake

I pray the lord my soul to take.

I don’t want to fall ill, I don’t want to contract some nightmarish disease or even an ordinary one.I just want to to sleep and not wake up. And stop with the twisted horror or pity on your face. If it’s there, you don’t know. Your desire to live and ability to enjoy yourself is just as alien to me as my craving for nihilism is to you.

It’s no one’s fault. I am severely unequipped  to handle life on life’s terms. I think I once thought I was, but now it seems that was arrogance. It’s more than the fact that Philip has died. Phil, my ex, has lost him too – and look how he’s doing. A LOT of friends, interests, a lovely home, a long-time partner, his daughter who adores him. I am happy for him, and grateful that Natalie has one parent who can show her how it’s done.

I think I suffer from mental illness. I stopped therapy over the summer – it’d been 40 years plus countless medications and still I don’t want to get out of the bed in the morning. I still can’t sustain a relationship. Not even with K, a person so much more loving, wise, smart and compassionate than anyone I could have imagined. But I managed to push her away and eight months later I am still mourning. And what am I doing to help my daughter? She lives in the this crappy little apartment with me but I do nothing to help her get on the right track, simply smiling and nodding while I watch her life spin more out of control.

I tried AA these last four months. But the problem is I bring myself there, with all my resistances and self-doubts and isolationist tendencies and I don’t pick up the phone to call anyone so I might as well stay home and watch TV where I at least don’t have to hold hands and say meaningless prayers during the end credits. There are people in AA who would be more than willing to talk to me. But I have to make the first call and when I think about doing so, the phone becomes unreasonably heavy and I cannot lift it. No one more than me realizes  how much I get in the way of myself but if I’m to be relied upon to help myself out I’m just going to drown.

Today I am waiting for call from a woman I’d asked to be my sponsor. She’s busy with work and with other women she helps and said she’d know for sure by today if she’ll be able to work with me. I don’t think I’ve ever given AA a fair shot. AA’s idea of God isn’t mine and the closest I can come to “turning my will over” is to stop resisting what is so. Aside from my language objections, there must be some sage advice the program has to offer me if I can hear it through the right person and I am desperate enough to want that. But what if she doesn’t call? Everything is the final straw with me; everything brings me to the brink and the hopeless tears don’t stop. I’m scared. What if she doesn’t call? Find someone else, you say. You don’t understand. This is just more confirmation of how alone I am and of my inability to connect. What’s the point of being alive with this much loneliness? What’s the point when I don’t want to go out, and when I am out, all I want to do is get back home and hide? What’s the fucking point?

K called and asked if I wanted to meet her for lunch today in Brooklyn, just get out and not spend this day alone. I almost said yes, but at my peril. She can see me as a friend, she can take care of me today and then let me go home tonight. I am not there. I want to see her because I want to hold her and cry with her and I want her to soothe me in bed tonight. And all this knowledge does is make me more lonely and grieved. Makes me more want to stop waking up because I cannot tolerate all this pain, all this only-pain. This is not something that just-passes. Oh, the intensity of it, sure. But not the the dull ache of everyday’s WTF am I here for and when is this going to end. I hear plenty of people grateful to have one more day, I hear plenty of people in AA claiming to have a life they never thought they could. And I am alienated further. My son is dead, my daughter grows distant, I’ve barely any friends. I am alone. What else is there to say? I am in trouble, and from what I can see, this time through’s not the way out.

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Holidays, 2019

08 Jan 2020 2 Comments

by Denise in Death, Death of a Child, Grief, Holidays, Lonlieness Tags: , , , , , ,

Memory’s a tricky thing. Unreliable. But it’s what we rely on to tell our stories and who are we without our stories? On January 1st I felt like shit. It had everything to do with the crash and burn of the holidays. Plus having to celebrate without Philip. But that’s not how I’m remembering the holidays of the past seven years, since he died. I’m pretty sure I would say I felt okay around Christmas because it meant I’d being see family and friends. It’s a warm time of year. It soothes the pain of loss because there’s more people around. It’s the season of love.

Is that true? I wrote a post on Christmas Day 2015 which pretty much said that, so I have felt that way. But so many of us struggle this time of year because we think we’re supposed to feel something we don’t. I haven’t recorded every Christmas of the past seven years so I’m not sure what they were like for me. Of course, since I drank when Philip died and started smoking weed sometime after that, I’ve not had a completely sober holiday experience in a good long while. So I want to write about what this has been like.

I have been overwhelmed and resistant. I bought and wrapped everyone’s presents, made six kinds of cookies, chocolate mousse, caramel cake. I even brought my baking stuff to the city to bake with my friend Cindy, who moved there last year. She insisted and I resisted but in the end it was the best thing I could’ve done. Natalie came along and working with the two of them around instead of in my lonely, cramped kitchen turned out to be the best day of the season.

This is the first year I didn’t put up a tree and I am still glad for it. Natalie usually buys our tree, but the thought of dragging my decorations from the garage to my apartment then dealing with a mess of pine needles that I’d be sweeping up until August made me cringe. Even now I’m balking at having to bring my wrapping material down to the garage but I have nowhere to leave it other than my living room.

So how else was this holiday season? The doing was nearly intolerable. I had to hold my hand every step of the way to try to soothe my ragged self. I wanted to see my family, I even looked forward to the drive to Staten Island from New Jersey to my brother’s house on Christmas Eve. It was all the steps in between that got me. I can’t remember ever being this anxious and edgy.  The grief – the goddamn lonely grief. There are a lot of adjectives I can attach to “grief” but “lonely” is the most potent. I ache with a loneliness that cries out, what is this all for? I ache with a loneliness that makes me want to vomit, which I’m no stranger to, which I’ve given in to a couple times these last few weeks, which I have not done for a long, long time. I am still searching for ways to cope.

I love winter, I say. But do I? It’s hard enough for me to go out. The cold biting at me makes it worse. And January/February are feeling like a long void which spring is not going to relieve. January is Philip’s birthday, February is when he died. In the past I’ve felt safe in these months, like the joy of his birth and the tragedy of his death brought me closer to him. Today all I’m feeling is scared. Today I’m feeling like I have to go it alone. I am his mother. How can anything, anyone possibly help? Of course other people have lost children. But it’s not like having a support group where we can all meet and “identify” with each other’s helplessness and so maybe get through it together. It doesn’t work that way with death. People have lost children, but they haven’t lost Philip. And I say that knowing so many people feel the loss of him, too – but each mother and child relationship is unique. My grief can’t be shared, it can only be held. And it is the loneliest place to be.

© 2020 Denise Smyth