Deflating

Not sinking, not crumbling, but slowly deflating

I’m losing so much air: all of the air that has held me up these months, years. Something has always kept me going and I mean more than Ritalin though I’m sure that has an awful lot to do with it.

This is the long game, and I am becoming so tired I do t think I can go on with it until it’s finished. After all, how am I supposed to know when it really will be finished? It won’t. I guess that’s the point of this journal: it can never be finished.

And yet, what about me, the kids, our lives?

We have a road that’s so long to go that it’s forever and we all know that forever is a very long time, right?

I try to keep going, and I try extra hard on the rough days to give myself as much grace and as much mercy as I can muster for myself, allowing me to be sad. Allowing myself to not do more estate stuff or filing of things or worry about all the stuff (made worse because it’s stuff that’s not worth much and I’m scared the fees from the business of death is going to quickly surpass what the estate has and both money and time just feel like they’re running out).

I’m running out. Most days I’ll be able to forget the needs to be domed and bills needing to be paid and I’m occupied & almost happy. But then the prick comes: the oxygen suddenly rushes out of my body. I have tunnel vision and I can’t breathe, and the tears well up in my entire body. A blackness sets into my brain and I can’t breathe only think that I’m shutting down and thank God for that because it’s better than being here with a nightmare I keep being reminded of at random times through the day.

Remember the love, I’m told.

But you see, that’s the problem.

Remembering the love is far more painful than any fights or disagreements we’d had. Remembering the love and the love lost (and yes, I think love does get lost, and if it isn’t lost then it’s transformed into a different kind of love that is far less tangible then the one I had.

Love gave me love and life and understanding. Love gave me oxygen. It cheered me on and kept me going. Love was a rock that I was chained to. Love made me feel whole, because with my other half-the man whose mind I read as much as he read mine-I finally WAS whole.

But now that love is either gone or transformed or I’m so preoccupied with the day to day stuff that I can’t see the woods for the trees (or however that goes). I’m half of who I was with him in my life, and I’m running on about 1/8 of a tank of oxygen, of the life that love gave me.