With surrender, at last comes some peace

There's a sense of calm in throwing in the towel; a serenity in admitting that there's no fight left in me; a peace in deciding not to rejoin the world of the living. It turns out that, having decided that I'm done, I'm completely free. I'm free of the pressure to feel better; free to spend every minute that I want living in my memories of Doug; free to live my truth, no matter how uncomfortable it makes everyone else; free to admit that I'm choosing not to try and live because living is just more work than I'm willing to do; free to stop these ridiculous failed experiments of forcing myself to eat healthy and exercise and sleep and journal and "do the work of grief," all in the desperate (and vain) hope of finding a minute or two of relief - not happiness, mind you, and certainly not joy or meaning or purpose or even contentment - just relief. Far too much effort for far too little return, that.

For a lifelong overachiever/teacher's pet type who always strives to do the absolute best at everything I attempt, it's positively liberating to admit defeat and give up.

I hit Grace the Grief Counselor with this decision on Tuesday, and I think I shocked her: see, I seemed like I was in a much better place during our session last week. And while we all know that moods can turn on a dime in grief, I don't think anybody expected I'd go from where I was a little over a week ago to where I am now. Journaling has definitely helped me process my emotions, but I don't think she expected that all that work would lead to me giving up. Evidently, I'm not as predictable as I thought. She thinks this is temporary; I think she underestimates both my resolve and my pain.

Brooke was equally stunned when I talked to her this morning, but - to her credit - she just asked questions and listened to what I had to say without judgement. She hopes this is just a dip in my personal roller coaster of grief, but she had the decency not to say that she believes that to be the case (FYI, there are few things more insulting or patronizing than the insinuation that I don't know my own mind).

I've got folks jumping on the antidepressant bandwagon again, and again I say it's not gonna happen. I don't want to artificially suppress my pain. My pain is REAL and VALID and it DESERVES to be felt fully and expressed fully. Antidepressants won't bring Doug back or give me the courage to try and live again; they'll just make me not care so much that my life isn't worth living. 

Thanks, but I'd prefer living my actual experience than one that's been dimmed by medications that can only address the symptom (sadness) rather than the problem (my life has been ripped to shreds and cannot be repaired rebuilt without a herculean effort that I'm not prepared to undertake). Think of it this way: when you buy a car, you expect to have to do maintenance on it, and eventually repairs. But if that car gets totaled, you don't keep throwing work and money at it to fix it, because it's a lost cause. Well, kids, I may not be a car, but I've been totaled; and as a highly analytical person, I promise you: the cost-benefit analysis of "fixing" or rebuilding me weighs heavily on the "not worth the effort" side of the scale.

You're free to disagree, and you probably do, but here's the beauty of it: you don't get to make that decision for me: my body, my choice, and all that. I realize that's upsetting to quite a few people, and while I wish that weren't the case, I'm not changing my mind.

I'm going to do the bare minimum that I have to do, and wait to die. That's it. You don't have to like it, and you don't have to respect it, but you ought to find a way to accept it, because it's MY life, and it's MY choice. And if I want to spend the rest of my days holed up alone in my not-too-far-from-looking-like-an-episode-of-Hoarders house with my nasty, overgrown-with-weeds yard, working when I have to, crying every minute that I'm not working, and praying for the sweet release of death every damn night as I finally collapse in exhaustion, that's my right as a human being. 

See, I spent my young adulthood trying to figure out who I was; from my mid-thirties, I was scrambling to raise my son pretty much entirely on my own: his dad had moved far out of state and rarely visited, and I don't have any family here other than my son. Even the time I spent married to Thing Two was time spent raising Andrew alone, because Thing Two was absolutely no help whatsoever.

But my son is grown and independent now, and this was supposed to finally be MY time: I've paid my dues, I worked hard, I did my job as a parent, and now is the time I'm supposed to get to live for myself and do what I want. And I was going to do just that. The ONLY thing I wanted was to spend the rest of my life with Doug. I can't have that, so the rest of my life needs to wrap up already. At almost 55 years of age I have ZERO interest in starting over in any way, shape, or form. 

I don't want to live this life anymore, and I refuse to be embarrassed by that or see it as pathological. It is perfectly sane and reasonable, given my life history, to come to the conclusion that actual living is simply not worth the effort. And for me, it isn't.

I'll still do the Facebook Live script reads that one of my friends put together, because I committed to doing them. As time allows and as I feel like it, I may work on decluttering my house (should be really easy to get rid of anything that doesn't spark joy when NOTHING sparks joy) so I can replace all the stupid knick-knacks I've acquired over the years with pictures of Doug. At least then I'll be able to look at him while I serve this life sentence with no chance of parole.