The more I learn, the less hope there is

"The primroses were over."

That melancholy sentence is the opening of my favorite novel of all time, Watership Down. The last time I read it was more than a decade ago, but that opening sentence has been indelibly printed on my brain since I first read it in middle school. "The primroses were over."

Doug is over. Life as I know it is over. I am over.

And I'm not being hyperbolic; I really AM over. I'm about two-thirds of the way through It's OK That You're Not OK, and that immutable fact jumps out at me from every page: I can never again be the person I was, in any way. And it's not just that book saying it, either; it's everywhere: online support groups, every book I've read (skimmed through, honestly - actual reading is very, very difficult), and damn near every widow or widower who reaches out (that last group usually starts out with the obligatory "it gets easier," but eventually most of them drop the mask and admit that they still don't want to be here without their dead spouse either).

Here's just a partial list of the ways in which I'm going to suffer, potentially for YEARS, based on my research:

• The pain will never go away.
  Depending on who's talking, it becomes "easier to carry" or "manageable." And yet, I've "met" several dozen people at this point who are years out and still in misery, so that's clearly not true.
• In our society, we're expected to use grief as a tool of transformation: create something beautiful out of it, learn to appreciate what we have, be a shining example of the human spirit overcoming tremendous obstacles.
  OK, there's NOTHING beautiful to be created from my pain and from Doug's death. We LOST everything beautiful; there's no polishing this turd. And I didn't need some fucking cosmic lesson to make me appreciate Doug; I ALREADY appreciated him, WHICH IS WHY LIVING WITHOUT HIM IS SO UNBEARABLE. And I'm REALLY not here to be anyone's inspiration.
• I'll lose friends.
  That's a guarantee. I'm already feeling the distance, because people are afraid they'll say the wrong thing, so they just don't engage at all. I expect I'll lose a lot of the people I currently think of as friends. Maybe family, too. You know what's worse? I don't even really mind. The worst thing that could ever happen to me has already happened. I lost the love of my life; I may as well lose everyone else, too.
• I may never recover my love of reading.
  Reading comprehension in grief is damn near nonexistent. I used to love to read: fiction, non-fiction, it didn't matter. Books were life. But it's common for the grieving to lose not only their comprehension skills, but also their ability to read and their affection for reading. For some people, that comes back after a couple of years. For others, it's permanent.
• My career may very well be over. And that's not solely because I still can't even contemplate being able to work again.
  From It's OK That You're Not OK: "For a lot of people it's a few years before their entire cognitive capacity comes back to any recognizable form (emphasis mine). Some of those losses are temporary and some of them mean your mind is just different as you move forward." So, the career I've worked for my entire adult life? I may have to throw that away and start over. But since I'm an idiot now and presumably will be one for the foreseeable future, what kind of career could I possibly have? On top of everything else, I get to be poor now, too, after years of struggling to get to where I was finally comfortable?
• I'll probably never be able to get on stage again.
  It can take years to recover the cognitive skills we had before. Memorizing lines? Yeah, I can see how that's not going to be possible.
• It will only get worse.
  Again, from It's OK That You're Not OK: "Talking with people in new grief is tricky. During that first year, it's so tempting to say that things get better. I mean, is it really a kindness to say 'Actually, year two is often far harder than year one'? But if we don't say anything, people enter years two and three and four thinking they should be 'better' by now. And that is patently untrue: subsequent years can actually be more difficult."

Oh my GOD, people. Years two and three and four are WORSE?!?

The more I learn about grief, the more horrified and hopeless I become. They say it gets easier, but it's all a lie; it's like the bullshit that it's good luck when it rains on your wedding day. (Fun fact: it rained on our wedding day; we got DRENCHED when we went down to the beach to take pictures. AND WE HAD SUCH GOOD LUCK, DIDN'T WE?!? ) "It gets easier" is just something people say to give hope, because hope is what the grieving most need and don't have. But it's a lie, and people should be ashamed of themselves for saying it.

It's not going to get better. I'm not going to get better. I'm not going to find some beautiful flower growing out of the compost heap that is my life. I'm just going to be THIS for as long as I'm stuck here. 

Standard disclaimer: I'm not going to kill myself. But I'm sure as hell not going to do a damn thing to try and extend my life, and I will continue, every single minute that I can, to will myself to just go already. Because I fear living like this far more than I fear death.