Grief and mythology

Seven weeks. 49 days. That's how long Doug has been gone. How is that possible, when he was just snuggled up to me yesterday? How can it be when the last time I felt his touch was forever ago? How is it that time keeps moving and yet doesn't move at all?

I feel as though I'm in a film, and I'm the character who's standing still while all around me everyone else is moving so fast they're a blur. I'm trapped. Stuck. Paralyzed - with loneliness, sadness, yearning, and fear.

I slept five hours last night. No dreams. Haven't eaten anything yet today; ended up eating just a little hummus with na'an last night after talking to my sister on Zoom.

I had my weekly session with Brooke this morning, and caught her up on how this week has been, especially yesterday. I told her afraid I am that I'm in a spiral that I can't get out of. I told her how afraid I am of everything. Especially, I'm afraid because I don't know who I am anymore.

This is a problem that's unique or at least has maximum impact, to people who lose a life partner: Doug was an integral part of my every day, so losing him impacts every single piece of my existence; there's no room, no subject matter, no hobby, no food that doesn't make me think of him. He was part of who I am, and he's gone. And everything we'd planned for our life is gone. So where does that leave me?

I can't go back to being Kathleen-Before-Doug, because she was completely changed by having him in her life. I can't go back to being Kathleen-With-Doug, because he's not here. So who am I? Who am I supposed to be? How do I figure out who I'm going to be?

These are questions that no one can answer. And it scares me. I'm too old to reinvent myself. What if Kathleen NextGen decides that she hates everything that she's loved up to now? Then what? I'm 54, dammit; how am I supposed to start over now with nothing? And yet, that's really what I have to do even if I don't end up hating everything I used to love: my old life has been obliterated. Whatever qualities I had, whatever flaws I had, whatever beauty I had inside me... they're not mine anymore. I'm in this place that exists both at the intersection of space and time and yet nowhere. I'm IN the dot of the "i," where nothing never happens.

Brooke said it's not helpful to worry about the future, but she knows full well that's near impossible for me. I don't do the here-and-now; I'm ALWAYS thinking seven or eight moves ahead. I may be a shitty chess player, but I'm very skilled at looking at the future possibilities in my life ahead and choosing which path is the best one. It's an essential part of my makeup, and that's one thing that hasn't burned away. But how do I choose a path when there ARE no paths? I've said this before; 11 days ago, to be exact:

I'm in this terrifying, pitch-black forest with no trail and no signposts - not even any stars I could use to navigate. I don't see any way out. All I see is the obliterated road behind me, where our love lived. But I can't go back there. Ahead is just a tangle of vines reaching out to entrap me, and trees blocking any path, and rocks tripping me, and I don't know how to get through it. I don't even know where I'm supposed to go. And no one can tell me where I'm supposed to go, so I'm paralyzed. All I can do is sit here in the terrifying darkness and cry out for you: the one person who could help me find my way to myself, and the one person who won't.

So how does someone who's always future-oriented get out of that space? Out of that forest of sadness and fear? I don't know. Neither did she. But she did lay out a few things she wants me to do, as something of an experiment:

• Take a walk outside, for just ten minutes.
• Make a list of daily tasks I HOPE to (not must) accomplish.
• Start working through The Grief Recovery Handbook; she said she used it after she had a loss, and found it very helpful even though she did it without a partner.

I went for the walk, but I did 20 minutes instead of 10. I listened to a podcast as I walked, which managed to keep me distracted (and therefore kept me from crying) for those 20 minutes. And yes, it's a beautiful day. But I can't say that the breeze or the sun felt good, because nothing does. I experience sensations that should be pleasurable (taking a shower, feeling the breeze and the sun, hearing the birds, smelling the flowers), and yet they aren't pleasurable. They're just there. Nothing moves me.

I started the list of daily tasks, but have a feeling it'll be a work in progress for a few days - my brain still isn't firing on all cylinders. The idea behind the list is not to force me to do all the things on all the days; the idea is to start thinking about practical things to be done and trying to do SOME of them each day until I can do them all.

I haven't started going through the Grief Recovery Handbook in earnest just yet, but I'll read the first chapter in depth tonight.

I'm lucky in that I have wonderful friends and family who really do want to support me. But grief doesn't lend itself to companionship; not really. Certainly not for me: I struggle with emotional intimacy; that's one of the reasons I was so poorly-skilled at choosing partners before Doug. Oh, I wanted to be LOVED, and I wanted to love (kinda); but I didn't want to let anyone get close enough to REALLY know me, and I sure as hell wouldn't open my heart enough to REALLY love anyone (we're talking romantically here - of course I love my close friends and my family, but that's not the same degree of intimacy and we all know that). But Doug, with his kind and gentle nature, and with his calm strength and steadiness... he made me open up my heart to him, and what a gift that was: to genuinely love a man completely and wholeheartedly. I willingly gave him the power to destroy me, and he didn't. Until he did.

No, grief is a "journey"* I have to take alone. I can bring a companion or two along for some of it, but this is all me, and it HAS to be all me. But I miss that intimacy. I long for it. I YEARN for it; no friendship and no family member can replace, or mimic, or even come close to the deep intimacy I had with Doug. And the prospect of having to live without it is profoundly sad and scary. Because we all want to be SEEN. We all want to be KNOWN. No one sees me or knows me, really. Not like Doug did.

*Can we talk, for just a moment, about the use of the word "journey" to describe the grieving/healing process? Because it pisses me off. I don't know why, exactly; perhaps it's that "journey" evokes a sense of eager anticipation. As you can probably imagine, I'm not feeling that. What's before me isn't so much a journey. Really, it's more like Joseph Campbell's monomyth: an epic quest taken on by a "hero" despite not wanting the quest at all. If this is a myth in which I'M supposed to be the hero, I'm in big trouble, folks.

And right about now, I'm REALLY sorry I never got into Dungeons and Dragons or other RPGs; they may have better prepared me for what lies ahead.

This is, I think, a subject I'm going to want to delve into in greater depth over the coming days and weeks. Perhaps it's a perspective that will help me make progress? I don't know. I do know that the monomyth is, after all, a construct of mythology. But my life is not a myth, so how I can translate the epic quest into my real life is a mystery - especially since epic quests usually have a tangible goal; I have no idea what my goal is. All I know is that I've been charged with an epic quest I have no desire to take.

Sigh... as I was writing, I glanced at the clock and it was 5:38 PM. On a Thursday. And BOOM! Flashback, right to TriStar Summit SICU Bed 12, holding Doug's hand and watching his heartbeat get slower, and slower, and slower.

I've worked hard today, and I don't have the capacity to relive Doug's death again right now without putting me right back where I was yesterday. So I put on an episode of The Walking Dead and made myself pay attention to it until I got past the 6:10 mark. And I feel really shitty about that: Doug had to live it; all I had to do is watch. He sure didn't have the opportunity to opt out of living it, and opting out of reliving it feels... like I'm cheating, somehow. But I couldn't do it, folks. Not today.