When the bough breaks…

I’ve received so many great messages of support, I will forever be grateful. Even the simple “I’m here for you” texts have buoyed my spirit.

It’s a struggle. My mood shifts not just day to day, but moment to moment. My mood is schizophrenic.

Tears and laughs and blank stares.

I was reading a post at Bad Catholic and a paragraph stood out:

This may be why the sudden death of a loved one is so unbelievable, so vomit-inducing, so utterly rejected by the human mind. The one we have loved, the one we have treated as a self, has died. It follows that we, a known self, in a very real way, experience a death within that death. (When Michael Jackson died it felt far different. He was an other to me.)

The King of Pop aside (go watch Spike Lee’s “Bad 25”; it’s really rather good), Marc Barnes has captured in brief my feelings at this point: death within death. Daily I mourn over little “ends”: the end of trips to the park with Jos, giggly conversations about celebrities, and raucous debates over politics and current events.This will be my first Christmas without her in memory. All of my best holiday memories feature her.

I’ve shared with a few that a part of me has died, and this becomes ever more real as the days pass.

Jos was cremated. Fire and flames and ashes.

I mourn the loss of our experiences together, but treasure what they have transformed into- priceless memories.

Yet, so very much has passed on, and daily I grieve the loss of her, the loss of me.