I know - I KNOW. I've been negative. I've tried everything I can to shift my thoughts, to focus on gratitude, to focus on the positive. The problem with that (and yes, I recognize that already I'm pointing out a problem, but this is the point!!) is that for everything I am abundantly grateful -- and there are so many things for which I am grateful -- I am brought back to sadness that I can't call my parents to tell them about this cool new thing for which I am grateful.
Grief is a process. Grief is unending. Grief is a ball in a box.
I've read all the articles. I've read all the books. I've talked to all the people. It doesn't change the fact that my parents are dead ... that they died horrific, slow, painful and unproud deaths. It doesn't change that they didn't see their grandson play the son of Mark Ruffalo and Anne Hathaway in a fucking Todd Haynes film!! These HUGE things ... these celebrations and joys are celebrated and then immediately deflated because I don't have my best friends to share them with.
Grief and depression and love and regrets. Oh, to be human is so complex.
I wish I could believe that my parents were sitting on a fluffy clouds in the sky looking down at all their grandchildren are doing. Maybe you believe that. I don't. I can't. I'm sorry.
I sit here in the dining room of my childhood home -- a home I bought from my mother, so Medicaid wouldn't take it if she outlived her prognosis (cancer had already practically bankrupted my parents during my mom's breast cancer treatment in 2001) -- staring at a beautiful stained glass window that my mom chose, and under which she would draw her last breath and then never exhaled again.
Y'all know how she painted this room five different colors and never bothered to move the furniture, but just painted around it. Well, the window that remains contains several jewel-tone colors that remind me of all the colors she once painted this now-greige room.
I love the daily reminders. I hate the daily reminders.
Any positive news is immediately flanked by negative thoughts, no matter how much therapy or reframing or "it's just a thought" or meditation or whatever happens, and I hate how it's making me feel.
All I've got is writing and music, and the outlets for that feel very small at the moment.
Hold your loved ones, my friends.
Here's a John Prine cover that makes me smile and cry. Perhaps that's the point. Tears and smiles go together, and that's okay? Ugh. Thanks for coming to my journal entry.
Grief is a process. Grief is unending. Grief is a ball in a box.
I've read all the articles. I've read all the books. I've talked to all the people. It doesn't change the fact that my parents are dead ... that they died horrific, slow, painful and unproud deaths. It doesn't change that they didn't see their grandson play the son of Mark Ruffalo and Anne Hathaway in a fucking Todd Haynes film!! These HUGE things ... these celebrations and joys are celebrated and then immediately deflated because I don't have my best friends to share them with.
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| Stained glass window in my mother's former dining room. |
I wish I could believe that my parents were sitting on a fluffy clouds in the sky looking down at all their grandchildren are doing. Maybe you believe that. I don't. I can't. I'm sorry.
I sit here in the dining room of my childhood home -- a home I bought from my mother, so Medicaid wouldn't take it if she outlived her prognosis (cancer had already practically bankrupted my parents during my mom's breast cancer treatment in 2001) -- staring at a beautiful stained glass window that my mom chose, and under which she would draw her last breath and then never exhaled again.
Y'all know how she painted this room five different colors and never bothered to move the furniture, but just painted around it. Well, the window that remains contains several jewel-tone colors that remind me of all the colors she once painted this now-greige room.
I love the daily reminders. I hate the daily reminders.
Any positive news is immediately flanked by negative thoughts, no matter how much therapy or reframing or "it's just a thought" or meditation or whatever happens, and I hate how it's making me feel.
All I've got is writing and music, and the outlets for that feel very small at the moment.
Hold your loved ones, my friends.
Here's a John Prine cover that makes me smile and cry. Perhaps that's the point. Tears and smiles go together, and that's okay? Ugh. Thanks for coming to my journal entry.
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