Personal Facebook pages prompt us…”what’s on your mind?” Tonight, for me, it’s this.
I keep waiting. Waiting for peace. For the tears to stop. Understanding. Anything. I wait for my life to turn a corner, turn over a new leaf or to wake up one morning somehow different than the day before. I wait for some kind of comfort or feeling of “better” that just doesn’t come. I wait for the feelings of panic, guilt, sadness (deep, dark, brutal sadness) and anger to subside. I wait to get off this carnival ride of torture where you finally think you’re getting off of the angry train or the despair train or the “please make this end” train only to jump right back on again in a never-ending circle of “this is the worst ride EVER.” I wait for the moment for a light bulb to go off or an a-ha moment to strike that allows me to think past the very second I’m in. To think to the future and just what that might hold for me. For us. My marriage…my life…my non-existent family.
But it doesn’t happen. It hasn’t happened.
How am I ever going to KEEP going through this? How am I EVER going to find that light everyone talks about? The other side? Where is it? Does it even exist? And even if it does, I fear it because it feels so terribly, horribly far away from Kate. As long as I’m crying, longing for her hand and her heart, I feel close to her. As long as she’s in every single thought and I see her face in every single moment, then it can’t be so long since I’ve held her, can it?
I am terrified of that other side. Because it feels like there…on that side…I do things like clean out her drawers. Wash the last two pair of pajamas she ever wore. Move things around in her room or put away clothes and toys in boxes. To what? Be given away? Her life? The things she loved most? Just….gone from our home and life? Unpack this cabinet above the sink that has been hers since before she was born. That cabinet has been opened twice in nine months. But if I open it again to remove the dishes…to pack them away for nothing, it will most surely feel like I’ve accepted that she’s gone. My head knows it. My heart knows she will not return. Yet this is her home. She lives here, doesn’t she? I put those things away and it’s like she never existed. It’s like she was a dream. She will fall farther and farther from my grasp and my arms will ache less and less to hold her. It will be so far from her that I won’t be able to conjure up her giggle in my mind or smell her hair when I close my eyes.
I will never be ready to wake up and be 60+ years old and trying to navigate what it’s like to be retired AND the mother of a four year old who still listens to her baby’s sound machine to fall asleep at night. I will never be ready to disassemble her things as if her life here was nothing. I will never be ready to have a bad day and not seek out Lovey Bear for comfort. I will never be okay with this. Ever.
God help me, I don’t think I will ever be okay again.