I don't want to be an addict

Original date 16 March 2011

How ashamed I am, to be so weak.

For this is the great discovery of my life--I am not strong enough to continue a life of no purpose except getting through the day followed by getting through the night.  I am not strong enough to believe that so minimal a life is worth the effort to protract it.

And so, after almost 6 months of struggling to learn to live with this pain, and it has become abundantly clear that a new season of my life is imminent, and the freezing cold season of Brian's death is rapidly vanishing, I begin, with much hesitation, and some hope, a regimen of one 10 milligram of Lexapro a day.  An anti-depressant.

Added to which, a pill to help me sleep, to banish in a drug-induced slumber the basilisk who haunts me and tries to convince me that my life is worthless without my husband; why should I outlive my husband?

Somehow, it's almost April.  Almost 6 months since Brian died.  I feel that I should apologize to Brian.  I feel stricken with guilt, that I am still here, and still more or less the person I'd been before he died, while his life ended.  All that was his...irrevocably lost.

There is something shallow, vulgar, trivial, about this sort of survival, I am thinking.  If you understand what I mean, then you understand.  If not, not.

You, who are healthy-minded.  You, imagining yourself safe on a floating island amid a sea of sorrow.  I am not resentful on my own behalf,  I am thinking that yes, this is what I deserve.  But I am resentful on Brian's behalf.

To lose your husband suddenly, or--to lose your husband by slow excruciating degrees.....which would you prefer?

It's a taboo subject...how the dead are portrayed by the living.  We, who are living, we who have survived, understand that our guilt is what links us to the dead.  At all times we can hear them calling to us, a growing incredulity in their voices..."you will not forget me, will you?  How can you forget me?"

Most days, most hours, I dwell in a netherworld of not here and not there.  Most hours of the day I yearn for the unspeakable oblivion of sleep.  Now, I am being made to think that my grief is sheer vanity, narcissism; the pretense that my loss is more special, so very special, that there has never been a loss quite like it.

Is there a perspective from which the widow's grief is but a kind of pathological  pastime, or hobby, a predilection of the kind diagnosed as OCD, not unlike washing one's hands for hours everyday, or hoarding every sort of worthless junk; on hands and knees waxing hardwood floors with paper towels and furniture polish, or vacuuming late into the night rugs that are already spotless....if only someone would publicly ridicule the widow, give the widow a good solid kick, slap the widow's face or laugh in her face...the spell might be broken.