Comment

Comment by Trina Mamoon on May 27, 2016 at 7:27pm

Dear O.L. Cato,

Your words resonate with me. While it's been five months for you, I am on my 22 months, on 4th August it will be two years since the love of my life left this world. You ask: How is it possible to miss someone this much and still live? It's a question I often ask myself. Especially the first year I would wonder about this very thing. If heartbreak and unbearable emotional pain could kill, most of us on this site would be long dead by now. But as I have found out over these past 22 month, excruciating mental and emotional pain doesn't bring death. Perhaps in the run it cuts down people's years, but in the immediate present deep grief, unspeakable pain, and relentless longing don't kill. Alas! Every day as I wake up, as I cry myself to sleep, and many times in between I pray for my imminent death.

Of course, I don't know if I will die tomorrow, a freak accident could kill me tomorrow, but the likelihood is small. In all probability, given my health condition and family history, I will live for 20-25 more years. The thought is so scary! If I could, I would take my life, but that's not an option b/c in my belief system, if I kill myself, I will forfeit my chance of being reunited with Joseph in the afterlife. Also, I don't want to put my loving siblings through such a thing. So my hands are tied; I live on day by day, if this can be called living. My life as I knew it ended the day Joseph died, and now my only fervent wish is to be united with him as soon as possible.

So I empathize with you fully and understand the inconsolable pain you are experiencing. I am so sorry, for you, for me, for the rest of us survivors on this forum. Take care of yourself. 

Sending you a hug, Trina

Comment by O.L. Cato on May 26, 2016 at 4:41pm

Tomorrow will be five months since my husband died.  I believe in "Better Living Through Chemistry".  Thanks to Zoloft I'm not crying all day.  I'm functioning better.  I sit in his leather chair and smell his scent.  How is it possible to miss someone this much and still live?  I want him...there are no words to describe how much I miss him.

Comment by morgan on May 25, 2016 at 2:35pm

Every day I prop myself up.  I try to prop up others.  I try to do things to help myself . I try to suggest things to help others.  I actually do things to help others.  

But everyday there is always something I cannot do without the help and support and love that I had from my husband.  And everyday there are things that I cannot get the kind of help I was used to having and so I just stumble along. I can't do this forever.  

 I was part of a team.  Instead of feeling as though I can make it through this by talking my way through it I am crawling closer to the bag of pills. Still crawling but they seem to be looming larger.

I do not know how to ask for help because it simply is not available to me with all the everyday stuff that comes up so I defer doing it.  Or I ask for help and am sorely disappointed when it comes at too high a price. And I don't mean a price of money. Everyone I ask for help has their own life.  I get that.  I have to be fit into their life and what problems they are dealing with. So as I struggle with how I am going to get something done it is exacting  its pound of flesh from me in the brain and how I think about life.

I wonder when the price will just become too high and I will succumb to the easier way of dealing with it.

Today is just another one of those debilitating days where crying is my only solution.  How many of these will my body have to confront before it just gives me what I want?

Am I going through another rough patch or is this just one long nightmare with interludes of just a little less depressing moments of time?  Haven't I suffered enough yet? I am now trying to force myself to stop this constant feeling so sorry and it just keeps coming at me.  I feel like I belong in a mental ward somewhere.  I used to meet these kinds of challenges to my life all the time and conquered them each and every time.  BUt he was beside me.  I have to keep talking to people.  I have to keep making arrangements for things.  I just don't know how much longer I can handle this. What can I do to change this paradigm?

Write……..continue to write and write and write……..

Comment by Mel Royer on May 25, 2016 at 8:29am

Thank you Morgan....I too have been amazed at the constant never ending addition of new members. I realize we don't live forever but it puts it into perspective when you see how the number of new grievers increases, day after day. Every morning, I sit and write my letter of Nancy. I always implore her to "come back to me". Knowing that she never will, I start thinking,well, maybe I'll "go to her" then. For a brief moment, i entertain the possibility of seeing her again and I feel some relief. Life is so hard. There is no joy left. I am dealing with other problems that are compounding my grief. Financial, house maintenance problems, too much to think about. Mainly, the reality of loss.  The loss of my Nancy and a hollow, broken life. 

Comment by morgan on May 24, 2016 at 2:59pm

Mel Part 2

When I see more of those little boxes in the side column it just pains me to know there are people who probably have just found this site and are desperate for answers.  I have no idea why we have been left behind to have to live like this. I was never probably super optimistic to begin with when looking at the world and all of the problems we have so maybe my own dilemma is that I don't see much worth in the whole thing.  Unfortunately,  my body continues to thrive. I spent a lot of years being self-aware, caring and taking care of my body. My husband was self-aware and caring he just didn't take care of his body as much. Although we all die from something different. Now I am doing everything possible to wreck myself. There's no explaining how my husband's death has rocked my world.  I'm totally different on one hand and yet I see the same person on the other. It makes for such major conflict. I attempt to act and do like the old me but my thoughts, my brain, my thinking is constantly overshadowed by the fact that he is constantly with me in my head so I can never separate that thinking from how I act. Everything just gets jumbled up. And I'm not even in any first stages of dementia either, I'm just exhausted from fighting my own brain.

 

I know this doesn’t provide any answers but your pain is so real in your writing I just wanted to have you know that despite what everyone seems to want to belive this is hell and I live there with you.  Writng this is not going to dispel that overwhelming attachment that is keeping you from living.  All it is meant to do is to let you know that you aren’t crazy and yes it is that hard.  I know it, you know it (most who write about it know it) and it seems all we really can do is write about it, endure it and hope that time passes quickly to our own demise and with some small amount of luck we find moments of relief and respite.  Other than that, this sucks. 

Comment by morgan on May 24, 2016 at 2:58pm

Mel,  PART 1

Sounds like you are in a place that I have visited and stayed for quite a bit of time.  The place I call the hole.

There is just no describing or understanding what this is doing to us.  I can feel in my soul how deeply hurt you (and others) are and I know the feeling myself because I have to tend to my emotions on a daily basis.  Everything feels so forced.  I push and push to get through another day and at times it's just another hour.  And then I wonder why I am doing this to myself.  Why am I bothering?

I don't have the answer to this question. I don't know why I keep pushing except I feel like I cannot yet pull the plug.  Although I cry to want to on an often enough basis.  For whatever reason I feel like I have to arrange my worldy affairs  so that no one is burdened with trying to figure out the remains of what my husband and I worked so hard to achieve.  It's not like I have some great wealth or major possessions and I don't even know why it matters but somehow I want to honor him and because we had so little time after his diagnosis and he was so sick we didn't spend a lot of time thinking or talking about afterwards so I am left to have to figure it out by myself.  I am constantly second guessing myself or at the least wishing like hell I could just ask him what he thinks.  

I think that is one of the triggers I run into.  I want to ask his opinion. About everything.  I am bereft because I can't get his input.  That's what those of us who were so close to our partners miss.  Talking through what we we were in the middle of doing.  Now we have no one to talk to.  

A cat or dog might help me fill the caring I need a little bit but I can't have a dialogue with an animal. And no one can be there for me in that way.  I have my guardian angel who I talk things through with but it is certainly nothing like the intensity that my husband and I had.  Or the routine of having our dinners together or going to Costco together or taking a swim or just hanging out on the porch.  None of that interests me anymore.  That's not to say I don't try to do it periodically with my sister or my widow friend.   It's just an act though.  I pretend so the people who have tried to stick with me or just others who I get around, I try to bury my emotions.  I’m sure they are very tired of seeing me hurt so I try to shield them from having to see the real me.  At the beginning I couldn't. And for me, the beginnig was a good wo years plus.

I am just not seeing an end to the pain of missing.   And the pain is different now than it was for about the first two years or so. For the longest time it just felt like a bludgeon.  I was immobilized.  Couldn't do anything really.  What I did do I really pushed myself to do.  In the last four to five months I have gained a little capacity back but I still only leave myself one major task a day. Some days none and I can last about four hours but after that I am finished. I don't even get up now until noon as I stay up normally till about 2am. I am just all over the place.  I would never ever have done that before.

Comment by O.L. Cato on May 23, 2016 at 12:16pm

I wish there were grief sessions around here.  CLOSED for summer.  I'm so serious.  No hospital grief sessions, no AARP grief sessions, just "do it yourself".  I would go in a minute.  I totally agree with what you wrote.

Comment by stewart p on May 23, 2016 at 8:36am

MEL, Have you tried attending any groups for example when my wife passed away the local hospital through their hospice center offers a bi-weekly beravement group which met for 90 minutes every 2 weeks?  Now I know a lot of people simply choose not to go for what ever reasons but having been around groups for the better part of 20 years I already knew there was something to be had by attending insteading instead of suffering in total isoaltion so it was a no brainer for me to get up and go soon after she passed away, and I went religiously for over a year, dont know how I would of made it otherwise and while there many came and went and some stayed.  But research shows there is a heal effect gained in therapeutic groups and I have a number of suspicions why more people dont take advantage of this, espeically since most of the time its even free, but Ive told so many time and time again of the merits of seeking out this sort of help and most people just give it the old atta boy and keep doing what their doing so, but if your up to it I suggest try it out, really big help to be around others like that, not just online here but in real person.

Comment by Mel Royer on May 23, 2016 at 8:15am

My losing Nancy has spiraled into a dangerous and deep depression, I have never felt this bad before.  I take a drug called Remeron and it seems to help a bit, but I still am dealing with that gnawing, cutting level of pain that develops after prolonged grief. Like Morgan, i cannot live with this much longer. It is a living hell. 

Comment by Chum on May 22, 2016 at 8:58pm

The aloneness is getting to me this weekend too, made worse by Jordan's dog dying on Friday. Another freaking hole in my life. Its my first birthday without him on Tuesday. I've been trying to think of something to do on the day when out of the blue an old friend invited me out for dinner. What a reprieve! I'm sick of feeling sad and alone.

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