I’ve been putting this off for a while. Months.
After being so open with all of my emotions and thoughts these last few years, I wanted to take a little break from being sad. It just got to be too much. Some of you more astute folks could read between the lines on the weekly updates I’d been sending out over The FaceBooks and asked after me. Maybe I gave you a platitude. Maybe I just said, “I’m hanging in there,” which is my go-to for moving on the conversation to the next topic. I just didn’t know what to tell folks who asked after me. “I’m still furious?” "Life is a tourniquet and my neck is turning blue?" No one wants to know how the monstrous depths of my anger.
Because that’s what I am. Still.
I thought it might be worth a checkup on the ol’ mental
health report card using the five stages of grief as our barometer. I got this list from
one of my grief counselors, mostly as a way to check in with myself to see just
how well I’m doing. Let’s follow along together.
Denial
This one is easy; I hit denial the instant the surgical team
told me they weren’t going to operate on Cathy to fix her blocked intestinal
tract. They looked at me with the same concerned eyes that you see in medical
dramas and police procedurals and I felt everything go slack. I don’t remember
much about the first week of our ordeal.
Denial lasted right up to the point that they told me there was nothing more they could do for her.
Anger
We’ll circle back around to you, buddy.
Bargaining
I’ve been doing this one all year; trying to decide if I’d been more insistent
with the doctors. Thinking back, trying to see if there was a time when I could
have made Cathy go to the doctor and get checked. Lots of “If only” statements
this year, along with a good number of “What ifs.” It’s only in the past month
that I’ve stopped trying to second guess myself.
They say that you don’t always experience the five stages at once. I can say with confidence that depression was the first stage I dealt with, as soon as Cathy moved into hospice. At the time, we thought she had a week. That lasted from August to October. During that time, I was pretty inconsolable. I tried to hurt myself, with food. I let cheeseburgers be the hugs I desperately needed. We were all still in masks, not touching, etc. It was the absolute worst. And I indulged every selfish, wallowing behavior I could think of, right up to and including dark thoughts about checking out with Cathy, for good.
Thankfully, those thoughts, while present, weren’t seriously entertained, and never made it past the ruminating stage. It was that serious panic attack during this time that knocked me out of my blue funk. The effects of that panic attack, coupled with the realization that I was careening towards more serious problems, snapped me wide awake. The next day, I told Cathy I need to get on some kind of supervised diet. She agreed.
I won’t say I’m not depressed anymore, but I have been (for
the most part) successfully battling it for much of the year. Good days and bad
days, as they say. But I’ve not given up on myself, and in all honesty, it’s this
stage I’ve been the most vigilant about.
Acceptance
According to the experts, “Finding acceptance may be just having more good days than bad ones.” I’ve been keeping up with this, and here’s some math for you.
I kept count of the days when I filled my self-care tracker
(five or more things from the list). As of this writing, I’ve had 164 good
days, if we’re using that arbitrary metric as the definition. The percentage of
good days for this year, so far, is 57%. That ain't great, but it's a passing grade. I'll take it, and worry about the rest during summer school.
This hasn’t let up. Not once. In fact, if anything, it’s broadened in scope, depth, and breadth. It’s taken on a rich hue, and a vibrant, striking crimson shade. Its voice is deep, rumbling my sternum when I let it out. And it burns. Like acid in my stomach, it burns. Like a brush fire in dry grass, it springs up almost instantly and threatens to engulf me.
It takes me physical effort to back out of it. One of the reasons why I stopped banging out regular updates on this blog was that I was a little scared of how angry I was, and I didn’t want to expose any of you to that. I know, I know...we’re in this together. I get that. But my heart, folks. It was atrophied, and getting blacker and smaller by the second.
I didn’t want to expose myself to it any more than I wanted you to have to witness it. So, I did the very unhealthy thing of packing it away, and that was a mistake. It only festered in the dark. What I should have done was put a trigger warning in front of a bunch of short, choppy posts, and let it fly. I even had a format to use; I was going to call it “An Open Letter to All the People I’m Mad At.” I was going to post a bunch of one or two sentence rants at everyone, all of them, who might not really have done anything wrong, but I still was pissed at them anyway. This would have included, among other people (the oncologist, the dietician, the surgeons, the florist, etc., etc.), myself, and also, Cathy.
I was mad at me because I didn’t do enough. You know, like make her go to the doctor, or encourage her to tell me if she was feeling bad, or learn all about experimental cancer treatments and started her on them the instant we found out she had it...or learn how to do surgery...you know. Reasonable things.
And Cathy? She waited. I found a journal entry where she was organizing her thoughts for a blog she wanted to write. She felt bad during the end of Sexy Laundry. She waited eight months, in intermittent pain, before she did anything. Would it have made a difference? No way of knowing. She also didn’t want to expose me to some of the awful truths she was dealing with, before, during, and at the end of her fight. Some things she never talked to me about. I don’t know if she talked to anyone about them. But she did compartmentalize her thoughts and feelings in an effort to protect mine. I am livid with her about that.
I didn’t want to get into all of that, not at the time. I was really missing her. I was incensed, and I had no focus for my rage. I talked to my therapist about it, and that took the pressure off, somewhat. I’ve vented so much of my spleen in the past two and a half years that it’s frustrating to me this gnawing feeling doesn’t ever seem to go away. It’s the last dregs of the ketchup that I can’t squeeze out of the bottle.
Going forward, I’m trying to transition
back to being a creative with deep and meaningful insights on movies with sorcerers
and robots in them. I have some interesting things lined up that is going to
simplify my web presence and give me a home base from which to operate. I guess
that means, in between the robots and the wizards, you’ll get the occasional
rant, or confessional, or navel-gazing revelation. I wish I could jut be happy
fun guy again, but I think he’s gone for good.
