A throw back Thursday post:
One of the stages of grief is denial. I’ve always understood denial as a refusal to believe. A refusal to accept. Something akin to putting your head under a pillow and saying ‘no no no no no’.
I haven’t felt like that. I’ve WANTED to be able to do that, but I have the visual in my mind of his dead face. I have the tactile memory of how cold he was. I have the auditory memory of how the air moved in and out of his lungs when I tried to save him. There’s no way for me to be able to say blatantly, ‘I don’t believe it. It’s a big terrible joke and he’ll walk through that door any minute, laughing his ass of because I believed it.’ I don’t have that luxury. If it is a luxury.
What I have is a sense of utter lack of comprehension. I know he’s dead. I know that means he won’t ever do any of the things we’d planned. I know I found him. I know what I did. But put all those things together, and I go blank. It’s like I’m looking at a huge, complicated mathematical equation. I can understand this part and that part, and the other. But as a whole, it looks to me like a big jumble of numbers and symbols that don’t mean anything.
I can’t make that equation fit into what I know of myself. I am not that person. Stuff like this, you hear about it, and your heart breaks for that person. But that person is not you. This person is not me. I can’t make it apply. I know it does, but it doesn’t make sense to me.
I always worry when I say that particular sentence, “It doesn’t make sense,” that people will misunderstand. I actually CAN understand why he did it. I can’t empathize, because I’ve never been in that dark headspace. But I can sympathize. I can see how someone could think that it’s their only way out. I understand that he had a chemical imbalance in his body. That because of that imbalance, his thoughts weren’t based on reality. I can understand that this disease, Depression, makes people believe the worst, steals hope, lies.
What doesn’t make sense to me is the whole. That big math equation. I can’t see how the parts make up the whole. I can’t see how this can be who I am now. The person who found the center of her world with a bag over his head, many hours after he’d died. How is that me?
I assume that at some point, it will just merge with me. This big thing that doesn’t make sense, and eventually, that WILL be me. And I’ll understand how that’s me. And that that’s me. But for now, I just can’t wrap my brain around the concept.
Written 3/7/2014
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