The “I don’t want to do this anymore” mood.

Our trip to the Bahamas.  She had a good time, I pretended to for her sake.

No one can describe the ebb and flow of grief accurate enough to explain just how deep the hurt is when you are on a downswing.  How dark your thoughts become, and how much this changes you.  The anger, sadness, apathy, (not to mention feeling the most alone I have ever felt in my life) occurs when I am having a particularly bad day.  Today is such a day and now is such a time.

This is what I want to yell at people but don’t, because they wouldn’t be able to understand it.  They would want to fix me when there isn’t anything wrong with me.  They would want to try to relate to me when they still have their spouse and kids to go home to.  There is a dark anger, and time and internal reflection is the only chance I have of dealing with it.

You – can’t – relate to it.  The mere suggestion that someone has the answers to cure me missing my dead wife pisses me off to no end.

I can’t spare the energy to make others feel better by smiling at them all the time.  It is exhausting to pretend to be ok.

See, I’m aware of my depression, and more or less I am able to deal with it on a daily basis.  By deal with it, I mean act normal enough so I don’t have to deal with people’s stupid fucking questions.  But it takes mental effort to constantly have to keep things in perspective and not go apeshit on someone.  To keep it together and function when all you want to do is sit in the dark and be left alone.

I can go through a day and act the way I would normally act if I felt ok, and no one is the wiser.  I had a lot of practice trying to give as many normal days to Felecci as possible.  Pretending to have a good time so that she could forget for a little while that she was dying.  The truth is, I haven’t enjoyed much of anything in probably 9 years.  Not like a kid enjoys Christmas.  Everything has had a subtext just beneath the surface, waiting to ruin it just as soon as I let my guard down.

Post-loss, these feelings are intensified.  It actually affects me physically; I have been going to doctors for a while to try to work out what is going on with various health issues I have been experiencing and nothing comes back out of the ordinary.  Sleep varies, and often 6 hours and 11 hours doesn’t feel any different.  Nothing appears to be wrong with me, yet I continue to feel like shit.

I am tired.  A large part of me just wants this all to be over with.  I simply lack anymore fucks to give about anything and am just living day to day without a goal.  I force myself to continue on mostly because I promised her I would.  But I. Am. Tired.  She is gone, and I don’t know what I am still supposed to do here?

I wonder if this is the fate of a man who provides for his family.  To be secretly miserable but unable to rest because others depend on him.  So we put up a front that only lasts as long as we have a purpose.  Take away that purpose, and what is left?  Why go through it anymore?

 

At some point, after a lifetime of working hard, aren’t you supposed to get ONE fucking thing that you want?  Why does family get to bother me when they fuck up their own lives, yet I don’t even get a chance to start mine?

This has made me so bitter.  I dislike who I am becoming, but how do you “look on the bright side” when you just want to punch the next person who presumes they have any fucking standing to give you advice?  I don’t want thanks.  I sure as fuck don’t want pity.  Because most normals do not understand and presume that their own problems are always the most important thing.   Here is a hint, I don’t care about your problems; I am having a hard enough time caring about myself.

I am resigned to the fact that I will be unhappy for a very long time.  But I will not make you feel better about yourself when you add to my burden.  I don’t have the energy to cheer you up.  You came to the wrong place for optimism.

What I want is not in anyone’s power to give.  In this condition, I am not much good to anyone who is looking for compassion or love.  I have too much anger toward life and god.  I feel dead inside.  Anger, sadness, & depression are the only feelings I still fully feel.  Everything else is muted.  I remember what they are, but I don’t feel them the way I used to.

I will work on what I can control and hope that these moods get further and further apart.  I am told that they do.  Maybe I’ll have some more clarity in the future and look back and regret how I was during this period.  But I can’t continue to pretend I am ok, I need to save my energy for surviving, and focus on how I am going to live with this and function in society.

I’ve earned my right to be pissed off.  I’ve got my cross to bear, pick yours the fuck up and carry your own damn baggage.  I need to spend some energy on myself or I don’t know if I am going to make it.

I am out of fucks to give.  I don’t want to do this anymore, but I have to.  Fuck I’m bitter.

 

Happy 40th Birthday Sweetie.

Today would have been your 40th Birthday.  You wanted a white cake like I got for your 30th birthday, but this time with cannoli cream like our wedding cake.  I couldn’t bring myself to get one – the pain of getting it and not having you here to share it with would have been too much.

I miss you terribly, but you know that.  Not having you around to just check in on or come to bed and cuddle with leaves me with a large void in my heart.

I have wondered how our life would have worked out had you not had cancer.  We would probably both be working.  We would have bought a nice little Tudor home and be paying god awful amounts of taxes.  We’d have had kids by now.  We probably would have complaints like normal people do.  We wouldn’t appreciate how lucky we would be to be dealing with raising kids and having a mortgage and having each other.  We would be in our own little world of problems, but we would be together.

Our lives would be so different.  I’m sure it would be a struggle, but we would have a family!  We would have children whom we could raise to be better than us, just as our parents tried to do for us before.  It hurts terribly that this was stolen from us.

You would have made an amazing mother.  You were always better at connecting with people then I was.  You so loved family.  You would have taken to it so well.  I would have loved to watch you be a mom.

I don’t know if I can still find our dream.  I’m scared of trying again only to have disease or misfortune take it away from me again.  I know you want me to, but I don’t know if I have the energy.  I need more time to decide if this is what is best for me.  I hope you understand.  I can’t just move on from you.  You were everything to me.  The thought of starting over scares me.  The thought of giving up on this gives me such despair.  Please help me figure this out if you can.

You would have dragged me to Europe and Asia again by now.  You wanted to go wherever the Travel channel was showing.  You had this great wanderlust.  You wanted to experience life where I was always intimidated or bored by it.  I hated crowds and people, but you were always able to get me to do things.  And we had a good time usually.  Mostly I enjoyed seeing you happy.  You had this great big personality behind all of that shy exterior.  You knew how to live where I only know how to survive.

Without you, I feel incomplete.  But I am trying, I promise.  I am doing my best to stay myself.  I hope I have made you proud that I have kept my word.  I have not harmed myself and I am doing a relatively decent job of taking care of myself.  I don’t want this life, I want you back.  But I am making due as best as I can.  I get up and try every day because you can’t.  I will try my best to live a life you would have wanted for us.  As well as I can tolerate it at least.

I hope wherever you are you are happy.  I hope you have a spot for me someday and we can see one another again.  I want this to mean something, to be for something.  You were too good of a person and too important to me to have gone first.  I wish I could have given you more time.

I know it was your decision to take the morphine.  I agreed with your decision.  I still feel guilty though because a part of me wanted to keep you longer.  Even though your body was failing, I wanted to keep you awake.  I fought this with every fiber in my being because I knew the quality of life would have been terrible for you.  But I never wanted to let you go.  As much as I wanted all of this to end when the time came I would have done this for 20-30 more years if it meant I could keep you and you could live ok.

I would give my life for yours if I could.  Watching you die was the hardest thing I ever did.  I didn’t want to, but I had to.  I’m proud that I endured through the whole process.  It was the last thing I could possibly do for you and it was the greatest honor in my life to watch over you.

It’s late, and I’m getting tired.  Please look over me and help me through my dreams.  I am struggling to make sense of them and I could use your help.  Oh, how I wish we could talk once more just so that I could ask you for your opinion on what I should do.  I feel conflicted and lost without you.  I don’t know what I truly want out of the rest of my life, and the only option I would take right now isn’t possible.

I love you so very much honey.  Not a day goes by where you are not in my thoughts.  I love you with all my heart.  I miss you so very much.  Watch over me, and don’t forget me.

Happy Birthday, Felecci.

Your loving husband, now and always.

– John