Grief and the overthinking girl

Slept five hours last night - that's WITH the assistance of melatonin. No dreams. OF COURSE.

Didn't eat a single bite yesterday. That's probably because I spent almost all of it crying. And I've started off today crying again, so it's not looking like the weekend is going to bring any relief.

Started reading It's OK That You're Not OK, by Megan Devine. The early chapters - focused on how our society does a piss-poor job of supporting the grieving, and the insanity that we face every day, were... not helpful, but at least reassuring in that I know it's not just me seeing it.

I got about halfway through before I finally crashed last night, and the chapters about how to get through the emotional flooding of acute early grief are absolutely useless to me. Why are they useless? Because they do not and cannot work on someone who has no hope and therefore neither believes she can, nor particularly wants to, move forward or tend to my pain or whatever bullshit phrase you want to use.

See, her recommended technique, when it all becomes too much, is to focus on something (or several somethings) physical that isn't part of your body: count the number of items you can see that are a particular color, for example, or, describe in detail something that you can see.

But here's the problem: that's nothing but a momentary diversion designed to temporarily take one's mind away from the unbearable reality. It's designed to put one in the moment, not thinking about the pain or the past or the future. My brain, like that of overthinkers everywhere, simply doesn't work that way. I can multitask like nobody's business, so even if I try to do that, the background narration in my head is chanting, "Doug's dead; you're alone, and nothing's going to change that." And staying in the moment is quite literally impossible: there is no "moment" anymore; the past (where Doug was still alive and loving me) and the present (where he isn't alive and where I don't want to be) and the future (the unimaginably horrifying future in which I'm trapped without my love for, potentially, DECADES of anguish) all reside together - a tangled ball of emotional yarn woven of love and loss and sorrow and loneliness and the aching need to touch him again.

All these techniques operate under the assumption that the aggrieved person wants to get through this and has hope of getting through it.

I do not, on either count.

All I want is to be with my husband. Nothing else will do.