Now I'm Just A Phony

If I could tell anyone how I felt in my non-internet life without making them so, so uncomfortable, I wouldn't be here right now blogging. It seems ironic; when life sails along, the ups and downs that look so small in retrospect seem to loom so incredibly large just at the time. Then something real, something so hard you don't know if you can survive it comes along, and life is divided into Before and After. You measure time by this. You think, "Oh, that happened Before The Thing That Broke My Heart," or, "Gee, things are so unimportant now that The Thing That Killed My Happiness happened."

The Thing That Wrecked Me. The thing that made me question who I am, whether I was a good person, as I had always thought. The thing that made me wonder if I deserved any happiness at all, if I was to blame, if I could have done something different, been a better person, offered more, done more, to prevent it. If I had paid attention. If I had noticed something was wrong. If I had.

Someone in my life is gone from me, but they aren't dead. On a good day, I don't ask myself whether that wouldn't have been better and more merciful. On a bad day, I wish that we had both died in some catastrophic accident, because then I wouldn't still be here, trying to pick up the pieces of a life that will never be mine again and getting half of them knocked out of my hands with every new phone call.

I feel empty. I feel trapped. I feel like a relic of the life I had, and because I am still here and the one I love is not, I feel misplaced, like I don't belong here, like I am pretending to be a part of an existence that is half-defined and meaningless.

I'm just a phony. I'm a cardboard cutout, holding a place until those under my care can safely move on to the next stage of their lives. I'm a smiling, nodding wind-up toy, only in motion when observed. Only existing to be the wall against which others' lives can echo.

I'm so fucking angry, and there is no good, solid noun against which to direct my anger. There is no one person, place, thing to hate. Except myself, for being such a selfish asshole that I could be angry about it.  I was wronged, yes, but only by circumstance. How do you express anger at blind, dumb, senseless circumstance? You can't, not really. There's no target there. There's nothing to punch or kick or fight back against. So you stand mute, smiling, nodding, saying, "Yeah, I'm pretty bummed out but I'll be okay. It just takes time."

Goddammit, I don't want to sit through the time it's going to take for this pain to fade. I don't want to have to exist through the misery that is my portion before I can wake up okay again. I am so unwilling to deal with all the suffering I get to see in the next however long, but that's what I have to do. I have to for the ones I love, and I have to for myself.

I know the day will come when I'll feel all right again. I know there will come a morning when I open my eyes, get out of bed, and live my life without feeling more than bittersweet pangs over what was. And you know what? I despise that. I resent that. I loathe the idea that someday I'll feel okay with the apocalypse I'm experiencing now. I hate that bitch for getting over this. It feels like I'll be grieving for the rest of my life, and like that is good and right and proper, the way it should be. But one day I'll be okay. One day I'll just be Mel again, happy and quiet and content and not sad and afraid and angry.

I wish that day was tomorrow. I wish that day was today. I wish I didn't have to think about that day at all. But since I do, I'll keep on smiling, nodding, saying, "I'll be okay," until the day that I am.

Passages

I've been thinking a lot lately about the transitory nature of the time we get here on this ball of rock. 

I spend a great deal of my time these days among people who are elderly, ill, or just fragile, and have seen others decline into a shaky state of frailty in just the short time I've known them, sliding from hale and healthy into wraithlike shadows of themselves almost in an eyeblink. 

I've also just fledged a child out into the perilous realm of adulthood, watching her undergo all the rites of passage I was just experiencing yesterday. I swear it was just yesterday.

It's humbling and frustrating and melancholy and awakens in me an envy I barely understand. I'm humbled at the weight of time and infirmity and the forced acknowledgement of my own and others' mortality. I am frustrated that I have wasted - to my mind - a huge portion of the finite amount of time I get here on dithering and fiddling and fidgeting and have never gotten any further than here, than this. I am desperate and melancholy as I watch all these passages around me, unable to stop the inexorable slippery drift toward change, toward different, toward gone.

And I envy that girl, that beautiful, headstrong, brave girl who has just opened her eyes on a new life. I envy her freedom, her unmarked slate. I envy her choices. I envy all of her as-yet-unrealized dreams, even as I beam in the knowledge that it was partly my scratching, clawing fight against the smothering weights of poverty and entropy and depression that got her to a place from which she could leap. I am gleefully aware that I wouldn't let her quit, that I refused to let her drop a single dream, that I flatly rejected the idea that because she came from poverty she wouldn't have the same chances as anyone else. I can congratulate myself for that, even as I suffer in the knowledge that my chances are passing.

And I can accept that there are things I cannot control - movement, change, the hurtling path of this ball of rock through the cosmos. I can accept almost everything that has changed, everything that has moved. 

But I cannot bring myself to like the fact that things have to change at all. 

  

Two Too Many

A few of you following this raggedy little blog may know that I have been dealing with the inevitable loss of a very dear online friend, George. Well, on Sunday night I got home and logged on to learn that George's struggle was over. He is gone from us.

There are many of us scattered across the globe, from Liverpool to Puerto Rico, who have been struggling with this. How can you define a friendship, let alone grieve such a friendship, when it primarily existed in the spaces between the ones and zeroes out in the ether of an online community? And yet here we all are striving to do that very thing while trying to grapple with a very real sense of deep loss and sorrow.

I have said before, and will say again, that online communities are the very definition of a "meeting of the minds." There is a purity of communication unmarred by pheromones or hormones or physical distraction that cannot be found anywhere else. Pen pals do not loom large in the physical realm and so their words can be truly absorbed, taken into account, and accepted free of any other consideration. And now we have all lost a great mind, a great friend, a good voice stilled before we had heard all that we wanted to hear. It is strange and hard and the reality seems cruelly surreal.

Tonight I received a phone call that has shocked me to stillness. Another death, this time wholly unexpected. A good, kind, gentle and generous man, a man I worked with four days a week, died suddenly. John had a heart attack, I am told.

What am I to make of all this? One death would be too many. Two deaths in the space of three days? It is too much. It is two too many.

The truly notable thing about all of this is that one loss feels no different than the other. Each of these good men left their mark on my life, on my heart in their own unique way, and the disbelieving grief I feel is the same in both situations. There is a hole in my life where these two voices used to be. I am poorer today by the loss of two good friends. And no matter how I met them and knew them, I did know them. I was fortunate enough to know them.

I am so sad. I am so lucky. I got to tell each of them how special they were to me before it was too late. In fact, one of the last things I said to my friend John before he left the last time I saw him was how glad I was that I knew him, how glad I was that he was with us and doing all the things he did for everyone. And George? I got the chance to call and talk to him in Hospice, and I got to thank him for being my friend.

Thank you both, gentlemen. You were good, gentle men. I will miss you both and I will take your friendships with me through the rest of my life with gratitude.

Good night.