"Learn to get in touch with the silence within yourself, and know that everything in life has purpose. There are no mistakes, no coincidences, all events are blessings given to us to learn from."
~ Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
I'm waiting for sunrise to get in my car and go on a new adventure.
After two months of being off my medication for depression, I'm finally leveling off and feeling so much better. I hope I never have to go through another nightmare to get the medication I desperately need, especially at this time in my life. Yes, I explained over and over again that I am experiencing a high degree of grief, but the order kept getting cancelled.
I'm so tired of fighting people who really don't care to do a good job. I have encountered this type of thing with all the stuff I have had to deal with regarding the Captain's death. The saddest is to appeal the denial for his burial rights. This stuff already stresses me out and what makes it worse is to have to address it over and over again.
The good news is that I am feeling better and ready to start fighting for what is coming to me again.
Nothing has been as it seems, or has it?
Some lines from a movie I recently saw really hit home with me and put the past year into a weird perspective.
"I was sleeping peacefully in the midst of a long darkness. It is good to sleep when you can't find the answers so I just slept for what seemed like months. Then I was pulled by a light, life was pulling me back."
It seems as though the roller coaster of grief has had me going back and forth as though I am having a bad dream, woken up to a momentary desire to get back to normal life, but swiftly pulled back out of the reality that is way too painful to deal with. Of course I deal with it, I have no choice, but the mind can play tricks on us in those painful dark moments of grief. I tend to want to just stay in bed and not face another day of the torment of a new reality.
I think to myself, "it can't be possible that my life has changed this drastically." But it has. Nothing makes sense and I feel lost without him.
I'm going though a crazy, difficult phase of grief where the long darkness makes me look at progress I've made skeptically. This too shall pass. I know because I have already been here 20 years ago when my first husband passed away, I just forgot how difficult it was.
The Memorial Day weekend was bittersweet and difficult.
Military holidays were so special for The Captain, they were a part of who he was. I had never experienced a person who was so patriotic and so proud of his military service. I often thought that when he retired from the military, a part of him died. It is who he was, but no longer had an active part in it. It is a sad fact of retirement, you kind of lose your identity.
Although I dislike war movies, I almost wanted the bombardment of his holiday ritual, marathon war movies. They meant he was alive and well and still with me.
It was one of those times that I just needed to be alone and cry my eyes out. Somehow it makes me feel better and allows me to be strong. That doesn't make sense, but grief does not make sense. Just when I think I can handle life again, it hits me like a ton of bricks.
Looking back at the memories that flooded me over the weekend, although I hate what grief does to me, it means that I loved deeply. And for that I will always be grateful.
