Suffocating

I have been waking up, lately, feeling the most oppressive depression. My first thought each morning is “My husband is dead.” I used to think that in the first few weeks after Chris died. Now the thought has returned and scraping up the motivation to emerge from beneath my covers each morning has become something of a challenge.

Grief is a strange entity. It’s twists and turns and backs and forths can drive a person completely out of her mind. I don’t want to wake up, I don’t want to go to work, and I can’t imagine how I am ever going to want to live my life without Chris in it. I’m still very much just going through the motions, trying to get on with the business of getting on. I’m tired.

I have flashbacks on a regular basis, still. Last night I was ambushed by a memory of Chris waking up on the fourth morning of one of his five-day chemo treatments. He just sat in bed staring. He began to put on his shoes and then got really angry and through gritted teeth he exclaimed, “I don’t want to go.” As usual, there was absolutely nothing I could do to help him and I felt white terror take me over once again as I asked him, “You’re not going to stop, are you?” He replied, “I don’t have a choice.”

I don’t know what Chris went through. Only other cancer patients know what it feels like to have poison pumped through their body and to lose control over their lives and to be stripped of choices and freedom and threatened by a black monster threatening to eat them alive and push their organs around, rearranging them into a painful, sick and doubly distorted internal Picasso.

It was easy to listen to others and to tell myself that Chris was doing great. He was laughing and joking all the time, he didn’t look sick, he was getting better, he wasn’t losing weight and he was living his life to the fullest in between treatments. I fear, now, that it was never true. How could it be? We were all living in denial because the truth was too much to bear, but what right do any of us healty folk have to talk about what is and isn’t too much to bear when our loved ones are dying from a disease that is so far beyond “too much to bear” that we can’t even conceive of their pain without dying ourselves?

Gotta pull it together and go to work.

Shneed.