I feel myself slipping.  I take medicines to alleviate the spiral down.  I have renewed skills in putting on the happy face…outside.  When I get home, I just want to be in bed.  It is not fair to my family.  It is not me, in the normal sense.  It is not fair or right for so many reasons.  But I cannot stop.

I really wish that I had actually gone through the grief 30 years ago!  So much was changing at that time though, I just could not deal with a devastating loss.  I buried it too well.  Now I feel pathetic for failing to deal with it when I should have, on top of the grief.

I have read so much on death and grieving that new articles that I come across are not new…just rehashes.  People get through it.  It is TOUGH, but they generally manage, emerge on an other side.  Changed, different perhaps, but they emerge.  I am not emerging.

I read stories of people that are able to dream of the person they lost.  I read stories of people that get signs from their loved ones.  Stories of going to medium’s and having the person’s spirit actually communicate with them.  The notion that the longer the time from death, the harder, the more energy it takes to communicate.  I find myself wishing I was haunted.  Was I?  Did I completely miss the signs?  Did Jen put into place the events needed so that I would meet my wife?  Has it been so long that the connection is now too difficult?  Am I too far down on the list, reaching out to family, or other friends, is more important given the energy needed?  Is it all bullshit from a wanting mind???

How does one achieve a level ‘better’ than 99% of the world’s population and still feel like a failure?  Does everyone feel worse than me?  How do they continue?  How does Joy get strung together long enough to be happiness?  I read that the key is relationships, and not necessarily a multitude, but quality relationships.  Luckily that plays easier to my personality, but what is the point when people die?  One relationship can never (and I do not expect it to) replace another, but the loss of the deeper relationships is so monumental.

Alone…How does someone in a city of 5-6 million, working in a large company, feel alone?  But it is not a recent phenomenon.  I remember feeling alone as a kid growing up.  I was never particularly outgoing, so that never helped.  I was an only child, whose parents went through divorce, and both had to work.  Pre-smartphones and video games.  I played board games by myself.  We moved frequently…starting over in schools, amongst friend groups that already existed.

Some of my most impacting revelations of lonesomeness happened around the same time as Jennifer’s accident.  Leaving my high school graduation ceremony.  Seeing everyone scatter to their different parties and family commitments afterward.  I had a party waiting at the house myself, should have been excited to get going to it, but find myself standing in the parking lot wondering what the fuck?  Alone.  Heading off to college and the good friend that I was supposed to room with decided to bail on college the week before starting.  Being reassigned to a room in the basement with no A/C and a farm kid that I had nothing in common with.  Alone.  Going to a movie that first semester, alone.  Then cut off from Jennifer.  No connection to her world.  Too frightened to reach out.

Others feel this lonesomeness.  I have seen it firsthand.  The first time it really appeared to me was that first semester of college.  Walking in between classes, hearing someone call out my name.  Turning to see one of my high school’s cheerleaders coming to talk to me.  Why?  We have never spoken before.  Alone.  Desiring connection to the known, the past, the familiar.  If lonesomeness is so common, and so debilitating, why do we allow it to surface?  Why do we put up with it?

I can never replace the relationship that I had with Jennifer, I get that, but why do I miss it so much?