Grieving

I am lost. Someone from my writing group chose to leave rather than stay in the same room as me and my sorrow. I should not have told what happened to my sister. But this is where I am. I am sorrow. She tried to comfort with saying it must have been part of something; that there are lessons for us to learn. I just cannot deal with thinking of my sister's life as a lesson and said as much. I should have kept my mouth shut... I should have nodded and let her believe that she was truly comforting me. But my level of tolerance for pithy declarations is low. Why am I, the aggrieved, expected to placate you in your stumbling efforts to comfort? Why do I have to deal with that too? It upset her and she left. My cohort in this writers group mentioned something about this being a safe space. I do not feel safe. (When a truck can drive through the wall of a house and kill your sister in the bed where she is sleeping, your view of safety, that was tenuous at best, is broken. "Safe as houses" is such a crock of shit.) But there, I laid my heart out and it was trampled on. I hate it. I want to compartmentalize. But how can compartmentalizing happen when you're dealing with writing and emotion? When this is where your writing is? I was angry at her for being upset and leaving, then I felt selfish... I am so selfish when I am sorrow.

Joy Swan

I got a memorial tattoo on my head that night. I needed that. A physical pain to commemorate the emotional pain with a beautiful swan that represents my sister. When I got the memorial tattoo for my mom, I cried. It was an emotional release. This one had no tears since I have been crying every day and night off and on for almost a month now.

But I feel I haven't hit the truth of my emotions with my sister. There is too much tangle with sorrow over cats dying and dog dying and worry about my other sisters and guilt for feeling sad about missing my trip and guilt for feeling relieved to be home... But deeper down I can feel an anger building. It's not here yet. I am still mired in sorrow. I am still sorrow... but the anger will come eventually.

And I am so tired. I feel like I might fall asleep in the middle of anything if I am not careful. I am sleeping more, but not well. My dreams suck. My writing sucks. I hate everything. I love everyone. I can do nothing right. I have the worst luck. That is not always the case. Do I go through cycles of luck and fortune? I feel like I do. But whenever my luck and fortune are good, I'm always waiting/dreading for the bad to come. When it does, it's always so much.

When my mom died five years ago, I kept waiting for the more. It didn't happen. I thought maybe things were different now. Maybe life was saying, "hey, here's this terrible thing you have to deal with. But here's time to grieve. You know how to grieve since you've had enough sorrow and pets dying and other things, so this is something you'll recover from." It was still so sudden and so sad, missing my mom and knowing all the work that my sisters and my dad were doing to make sure Joy was taken care of (and feeling guilty for being far and not helping)... But it was tenable.

But this... this is shit. This is like life took a huge bucket of suck and dumped it all over my family, making sure my youngest sister whose house it was got the worst of it (next to my oldest sister who died) with me getting a big splash off right in the face. And it splashed in all directions, before and after Joy's death, killing two of my cats, one on each side, before and after the accident, and my sister's dog on the latter side. No, not a bucket of suck... a bomb... an explosion... a truck crashing through a wall.

One of my aunts said, "God only gives you what you can handle." Glazing over the god comment and the pomposity of christians to think that their beliefs are the only ones that matter, I might've sprained my eyeballs trying to force them not to roll into the back of my head. I mean, no one ever commits suicide from not being able to handle the things in their life. Right? RIGHT?!?

Now that I brought up the dreaded 'S' word, I will take a moment to reassure you, dear reader and friend, that I am NOT suicidal. I wouldn't do that to my partner or my friends or my family, especially not with all the other shit they're having to deal with. Also, I don't feel suicidal. (I've been suicidal before... I know what it feels like and this is nowhere near that.) Suicidal for me meant that I was not writing. As long as I'm writing, either about what I'm going through or just random other things, nothing is quite so dire. I am writing every day, even if it is the worst, I am writing out my emotions and trying to make some sense of incomprehensible things through words that are completely fucking inadequate and stupid and I hate them and almost wish I didn't even know language so my thoughts could not form words and I could not write down all this drivel... But I am writing. I am sad and filled with more emotions than I know what to do with, but I am still writing.