People ask how I’m doing.
“Fine?”
There’s always a slight question mark with that answer. Like I’m not quite sure what fine is supposed to be. Sometimes, depending on the person asking, I’m able to answer a little differently.
“Broken.”
Thing is, even with that answer, I can deliver it with a shrug and a self-deprecating smile and people understand without pressing for more information.
Which suits me just fine.
Because beyond that one-word description, there isn’t much I can say.
Seven months ago I lost my mom. My mom was my best friend. We’d talked and laughed together every day. There isn’t an aspect of my life she wasn’t part of. In all my juggling as mom, wife, neighbor, etc. there was always one person who’d check on me. To ask how I was doing while I was carrying the mental or physical burdens of those around me. One person to “mother” the mom.
And now she’s gone.
I still go through the day without letting things remind me. I don’t stop to let it sink in. I can’t.
Broken.
Some nights I dream that she’s alive and we’d just thought she’d died because she was in a coma for a month. And in those dreams I worry about trying to track down her favorite cardigan, or figure out where her earrings went when we cleaned out everything. I wake, trying to figure out what was real and what was dream, and have to claw my way back to a reality darker for her loss.
And then last month, still not recovered from the loss of my mom’s light and joy from our family, we lost my father-in-law.
More suffocating loss and grief. More feeling helpless and lost.
People tell me I’m strong for ‘handling everything.’
It doesn’t seem like strength when you are merely dead inside.
You see, I’ve built walls.
Defensive walls off my ‘coast’.
Kaiju-sized defensive walls. Of course, we all know how well those [don’t] work.
I’ve walled the grief away. The anger gets past, like the fine sea mist spraying over the breakers. And I can feel everything else trapped behind that wall increasing. All those things that help you connect with life and other people—all the other emotions and thoughts my robotic progression doesn’t afford me.
Pressure and pounding building.
Like the ocean itself. The surges rise and beat at the walls, but no release comes.
I feel it in my head- pressing behind my eyes- choking my throat, and clenching at my chest from within.
But if it’s behind the walls I can take a step at a time. Pretending to do things and fulfilling my responsibilities, while helping the precious ones still around me shoulder their own grief.
I’m afraid.
I’m afraid that when it finally breaks that everything dark and ugly inside me will come tumbling out with the tsunami and I will say and do things I will regret.
I fear the monster that will break through.
There are cracks in the walls.
There's Magic in Story, 