Grief: Bummer of Friends

I know I talked the other day about not wanting to allow grief to become my personality, but it seems the longer this goes… the more of my personality that seems to occupy. I am immensely broken inside and I feel like the shambling dead moving through life on autopilot right now, trying to retain some semblance of normal out of the wreckage of my life. I don’t like this, not one little bit. However I also sort of feel helpless to do anything about it. My brain feels like it is stuck in this gouge that was placed in my life at the beginning of this month, and no amount of flailing about seems to be able to unseat me from this channel. I know grieving is a process that takes time, but I hate how much of my processing cycles it seems to be taking up. To paraphrase a quote attributed to Oppenheimer… I am become grief, the bummer of friends. I know I am a drain on the mental health of those around me… but I just don’t know how to exist in any other fashion right now. I’ve spent a lot of time retreating into books and games, and that has helped considerably because I can temporarily place my mind in someone else’s life. I get that this is also not really me dealing with my situation, but I feel like I can only be me for so much of the day without it tearing me apart. There is this Catch 22 of the situation I am in where I have equal numbers of individuals who deeply care about me both wanting me to move on with my life, but also needing me to be the constant grieving husband. I am attempting to do both in equal measure, because I am both at the same time. I’ve made a bunch of largely meaningless changes that I could have done at any point… but never did until I just decided to do them. I’ve also done nothing at all to tackle the mount of stuff that I should find a new home for, that I will never actually use. The extreme heat has been slowing some of my progress… but also I think I mostly just need to set aside a project or two every weekend and push through them. I think one of the low hanging fruit is probably to go through her jewelry and package it up so that folks can go through it and see if there is anything that they want to keep before donating it somewhere. I think the thing that I am struggling with the most right now… is the way in which my wife is being remembered. Like she was so many different things to so many different people. She was an extremely complex three dimensional person, and there were sides of her… that only I knew… that were combined with all of the different sides that she showed segments of the world. We were both pretty private people and had a bad habit of segmentation of ourselves… into the person that people wanted us to be in specific situations. So many of these people who are remembering her fondly… only know one small facet of who she was as a human being. They are mourning this person that they knew… as though it was the totality of who she was as a person, and there are times I want to shake them and scream at them… that this person they have invented didn’t exist… at least not in the way that they think it did. There is this thing that happens when someone dies… that I have not so lovingly referred to as the canonization phase. Where they shed anything that might have been edgy about a person and only choose to remember the most positive of virtues… effective erecting a new saint in the place of the person. To her church family they all viewed her as this hyper godly woman… because it was the faithful aspect of her that she chose to show them. To her educational family they all viewed her as this penultimate teacher… because she spent countless hours in her office in self doubt stratifying her thoughts until they were razor sharp and ready to be presented to the world. To her family, specifically her sister and her closest friends she was this rock to lean on… always there with a kind word when you texted her… but that largely existed because she had numerous relief valves that allowed her to blow off any negative energy so she could keep up a positive facade to the world. In the retelling of stories about my wife… I am seeing so much sanding off of rough edges and slowly rounding the narrative of who she was into the most readily accessible and digestible fable. That is not to say that she was not all of these things that people are saying and more… it is just that the totality of who she was is getting lost in the retelling. The totality of who she was… was probably really only known by me. It hurts so bad to see all the nuance being lost. It was that nuance and quite honestly flaws… that allowed her to be the person that she showed to the world. So I feel like I have to remember the real her, like it is some sacred mission that I must uphold and I am scared to death I will forget that nuance over time. I have a shitty memory if we are being perfectly honest. I am scared I am going to forget some key moment in this delicate matrix of who she was as a person… because I can’t lean on others to remember her correctly for me. Tomorrow is the twenty seventh anniversary of our wedding, and I know it is going to be an exceptionally hard day for me. I took the day off work because I knew there was no way I was going to limp through a series of meetings. I should probably go do something… I just have no clue what I actually am interested in doing. I might stay here and work through some of the projects that I know need to get done. I might also just say “fuck it” and spend the entire day reading or playing games. I know I will break down several times throughout the day and that is okay. I’ve had many people offer to come over, but really… that would only serve to stress me out in different ways. The only person that I did not feel like I needed to put on a mask for was my wife. She was my person, and the only one I ever truly let me guard all the way down around. Ironically a lot of my friends that I made through gaming, and have never met in person… have probably seen a more genuine version of me than most of the people I know in person. It does make me wonder how I will be remembered, and what edges will be sanded off when someone tells my tale. I largely think I will be forgotten, because I have been too weird and hermit-like for most of my adult life. Sure I have been the pillar of several gaming and blogging communities, but most of that doesn’t really translate to the real world. I play a fairly important leadership role in the workplace… but I also struggle to care about that right now. I have been trying to pour myself into work as a coping mechanism, but it has been hard. Nothing that we do there feels like it matters anymore, or at least not in the same way it used to when my wife was still around. There were so many things that worked, because I knew I had another human being that supported me at home. With that gone… I sort of don’t even know who I am right now. None of this is a cry for help, or asking for someone to come along and fix me. I am going to have to make it to the other side of this chasm on my own. I am not one that accepts help terribly well, and even when given… it often stresses me out more than it actually resolves my problems. I have to figure this out on my own. I have no clue if I will make a blog post tomorrow, because I have no clue if I will actually get out of bed. We will see what tomorrow brings. I might go get cronuts from the fancy donut place in an attempt to start he day on good footing. Anyways if I do not see you tomorrow, think kind thoughts. The post Grief: Bummer of Friends appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.