Pink Glitter, Full Moons, and Revisionist History

Hi,

Sunday night. A full moon. A bitter cold streak of single digit weather in the last week. A headache that seems determined to stick around and the pain, back. I knew it would be back but enjoyed the reprieve that the work week seems to bring. Business. A mind able to stay on other things when its told to. Work that matters to me. Engaging people who deserve my attention and assistance. I am grateful for all of these things. Grateful for them like a drowning person is for a life boat. I know these people, this work, these distractions are my survival. My rescue team.

When I say that my pain came back--make no mistake--it was never really gone but it seems to have subsided or shifted into a shape that I could manage. I felt sort of vaguely in control of it. Then it was Sunday, today. I dont know what happened to me. I was ok, moving thru my day and then I was struck down with...loss. A song on a cd someone I used to know well made me. A Bruce Springsteen song I think aptly titled "You're Missing"--and I am transported to emptying my Dad's closet, going thru his stuff, laying in his closet on the floor the night before his service because the clothes smelled like him. I am there and I cannot move from there. I am there while I am in the car, riding along, my kids are talking, husband is saying something, the radio is on, the sun is out and...I am not here at all it seems at these times. At these times I am still on the closet floor, unable to really move, just wanting to stay there where I think maybe I can feel him or smell him or maybe I can just pretend this was all a bad dream and I'll wake up and it will be ok. I will have been in a coma or accident and dreamt it all. I have thought that. I have wished that.

And so I cry. I cry for my pain, for his, for both of us. For Mental Illness, for depression, for the pain we cause ourselves and each other when we can't connect and stay alone. I cry and then I stop. I get up. I make Valentine's with my kids. I put pink glitter on everything and feathers and more glitter. I think of making a Valentine for my Dad. I think of how he used to always buy me carnations when I was little, pink for Valentine's Day and then green for St Pattys Day. I think about how I depended on that, could count on it, usually. I think of the complexity of my Dad. How he valued his family but couldnt really let us in and how he was proud, and would not ask for help, and then how he did and wouldnt accept it. I think too much.

I call my Mom. I say nothing or something but not really this. I could be saying anything it is just words coming out and filling up space. I dont say, help me, I cant breathe, I miss my Dad. I am scared I will lose you too, or lose my husband, or lose my kids or my sister or my anyone. I dont say that. I say I'm ok. Things are ok. I dont know why but I cant say the truth outloud. I am an epic liar during these points. I think of my Dad, alone is his house, sad, depressed...I'm ok hon, thanks for calling.

My Mom tells me she found something I wrote about my Dad from 1990, calling him my hero but writing about his depression. I was 17 then. We talk a little about how long this has really been going on. A strange phenomena seemed to have occured after his death where I wanted to say his illness was really stable until the end but my writing contradicts this. How much I want to rewrite our history to make it cleaner and easier. For both of us, I want this. His BiPolar and my desire to heal him it seems started much before 2012. My life and identity growing around and out of his like a vine. My pain over not knowing how to fix it found its home in a bottle. His pain, sadly, ongoing.

Full moon. Pink glitter on the floor, on my sweater, in my hair. Waiting for a pink carnation that wont come this year. xxK



 

Sticking with My Story...

Hi All,

I just re-read my last post about "my story." It seemed so clean, hopeful, true. Too bad I cant seem to stick with my own story. My monkey mind is just jumping around bouncing between blaming myself, blaming mental health professionals, blaming my Dad, blaming is so increadibly unproductive, so totally misguided, and (at least for me) so full of pain. When the pain of the loss gets too much I realize that I begin to blame. It doesnt matter if I blame myself or someone else it all feels ugly. It all feels wrong. To be honest, it feels exactly like what my Dad would not want me to do.

My Dad was proud, maybe to a fault, rigid, and the product of military school, the 1950's, and male patriarchy at its finest. He was a chauvinist, I think,without even really knowing it. He grew up in a world that encouraged him, a white, college educated, military man to excel because of course he would, should. Throughout his life I think my Dad was confounded when things did not go as he expected or planned. When things were not as they should have been. Often I felt as though he simply refused to accept things as being different than what he wanted or needed them to be. Ultimately, I think this proved to be isolating and painful for him and for the people around him too. His inability to accept a life that was not at all how he felt it should have been.

There was love, beauty,  and kindness all around my Dad but I fear it did not look as he thought it should and so he missed it. My Dad is not alone in this...problem. There is a lesson here and it is for me too. Life is painful. It is. People disappoint us. Life maybe disappoints us and it is hard and it is not what we expected. If we are prone to black and white thinking it is so easy to feel as though things have not turned out right. I feel that I am on the edge of that kind of thinking right now. I feel the pull of the darkness, the sadness, the hopelessness as I walk thru my day but I notice it as...well...ok. I notice the sadness as ok. I try not to think I should anything. I just am. I seek love, beauty, and kindness in unexpected places, in any and all places. I am trying very hard to get the shoulds out. No more judgements, no more disappointments, only what is true--I loved my Dad and he was exactly as he was supposed to be, all of the time, and even now. xxK

 

The Choices I Have

Hi Friends,

Tonite I was thinking about a few different things while sitting at yet another of many AA meetings. I was thinking about how increadibly quickly I can default my crazy alcoholic brain into feeling sorry for myself. Given recent events in my life it probably is obvious that I have a lot of material to work with lately...and that is when it hit me. Self pity IS my alcoholism in action. When I start feeling sorry for myself I am immediatley transported to self centeredness and victimhood. It is not a fun place to visit let alone spend any amount of time. It is in fact very isolating to really feel sorry for yourself because to do it really well you need to be certain that you are in a uniquely painful position. I will convince myself that my pain is unique and different in order to really wallow. Why? Because feeling sorry for myself only really is possible for me if I first convince myself that no one else really even can understand my pain, let alone relate to it.

To really get my expertise on this topic you would have had to see me in action after 3 or 4 martinis back in 2000. At this point in my life and after this amount of alcohol I was sure to tell anyone who would listen about my particular family drama, my victimhood, my terrible job, mean boss, and downright sad life. I told these stories to myself outloud and in my head. I told these stories about my pain that made my pain unique and different. I had special pain and you would surely drink too if you had my exact sort of pain...

And so it went. I drank and drank and then drank some more. Thought endlessly about my life, things that had "happened to me" was my narrative. Rarely did I talk about my own choices. Rarely did I pontificate on how my own choices had impacted my life. Instead, I choose to think about and talk about how other people's choices had impacted me. I sort of pretended that my life was the sum of other people's choices. I sort of believed this.

Today, I know that my thinking back then was...unhealthy. I can see clearly that I do have choices. I dont always have choices about what happens around me but I do have very big and important choices to make about how I respond to what happens around me. I have a choice about the story that I tell myself and the story that I tell you too. So what will my story be? Will I tell you that my Dad took his own life to hurt me? Will I say it was mean? Awful? Hurtful? No, I will not. I will tell you that my Dad suffered from a chronic mental illness called BiPolar Disorder that, like most mental illness, got more severe and destructive as he aged. I will tell you that I am lucky he somehow lasted 74 years despite chronic thoughts of despair and hopelessness. I will say that he waited until he knew that both me and my sister were ok and then he finally ended his own pain. I will say that even his final decision to jump out of this pain was colored, if not determined, by an illness that I can only hope and pray I will never truly understand. This is my story and this is what I will say. xxxK

The Spirit of Christmas

Hi All,

I have been so consumed with the recent death of my Dad that I have not even had time to mention my amazing new job. I am working at a DV Shelter. It is an amazing job, filled with amazing women and kids, and possibly more amazing colleagues. I do not think it was an accident that just when I need them the most I would be surrounded by survivors. Truth be told I didnt need my job to find survivors because I live with one and, in many ways, am surrounded in my life by survivors of all sort of things, all of the time. This past week at work I had the opportunity, blessing, good fortune to be asked to help wrap Holiday presents for some of the residents, the night before I attended the Holiday party for both former and current residents. That night and the next day something happened to me. I felt around me the genuine selflessness that to me is sort of what Christmas is about.

For those maybe 12 hours I forgot myself. I forgot my own pain, my own loss, my own story. For that time I was both in other peoples stories and also a silent observer of their stories. I felt somehow transformed leaving work that day. I felt something had happened to me. That I had had this experience of waking up in a new job, with a new life, and with the very real understanding that I am not, nor have I ever been, alone and that this pain that I feel, this understanding that I now have of the fragility of life, this knowledge that I have now is something precious. It is not a bitter knowledge. It is a gentle nod.

I nod to the survivors all around me who know what it means to pick themselves up and begin again. I will happily share my time with these women for as long as it seems to be helping them. I will know deep down in my soul that there is some divine order to how things have unfold and how I have ended up here, now.

I think often lately of what my life is all about. I think about what I want it to be about. I think about my Dad and what his life was about too. I think of his quick humor or his thoughtful cards or his ever present phone calls. I think about how at the top of my own salary scale in my late twenties I was showing him my $400 wallet. I thought he'd be so impressed. He then asked me when I was going to get a new watch to go with it? He asked me when it would end--this quest for the best stuff? He was smiling, but I felt silly. I didnt know what to say. I knew right then that he was right. Deep down I knew that my Dad understood something fundamental about values. About what was important and what was not. It was less than a year later when I left NYC, black pant suits, and the advertising industry. I think I made my Dad proud when I did this. I think he knew that I had heard him. xxK

Feeling feelings.

Hi Friends,

Today is Tuesday. This past Friday there was another tragedy that impacted me. This one on a national scale, of course, the Sandy Hook Elementary School Shootings. The  impact that this tragedy had on me was predictable since what parent didnt feel this on a primal level but also was sort of weird in how it intersected with my already broken heart. I felt like I was just starting to get back up and got knocked down again. I felt broken down by the tragedy, the pointlessness, the violence, the horror. What did happen for me is that it woke me back up to the very real notion that I am certainly not the only person to feel pain, to feel loss, to feel trauma. People all over the world and every single day feel these painful feelings and deal with not only loss similar to mine but sometimes far worse. When I thought of this I felt briefly determined to see my loss in the context of all of our lives that are each filled with our own unique, but equally painful, unexpected pain and loss. The danger it seems for me is to somehow make my pain unique and different when really it is not that unique, not that different.

Today I cried a lot. I dont know why. I thought I was doing better and then I just wasnt. The roller coaster quality of grief apparently is a fairly universal thing but really is hard to handle. Sometimes I feel like I am riding the mechanical bull of grief just holding on and hoping for the best. At some points I have felt sort of ok only to five minutes later get thrown off the bull. I find myself really just learning as I go. Trying to practice the principles I've learned in recovery and praying for the continuing willingness to work hard on not just surviving this but someday, somehow, growing from it.

When I looked in the mirror tonite I could see on my face the pain, the loss etched into my eyes. I would swear that I have not looked like myself since when this horror story really began sometime around my birthday in mid November. At first this made me feel bad but when I really think about, really take the time to consider it, I dont feel bad that that pain is there. Visible. I feel that this is me, this is my face, this is where I am at now. I am glad I am not Xanaxed into oblivion looking happy when inside I am breaking up. I am glad I am not drinking 4 martinis while explaining to a stranger that my Dad just died. I am glad that I look like I how I feel. I am glad I feel how
I feel.

The first step of AA that says, We admitted we were powerless over alcohol and that our lives had become unmanageable. I would amend this, for me tonite, to say that I admitted I was powerless over my grief and that my life was becoming unmanageable. Of course the second step says, We came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity, and third,  Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood him. That is where I am at. I making a decision right here tonite to give this loss, grief, sadness, anger, confusion  to the God of my understanding. I've done enough damage to myself with it and now I think I am ready to turn it over. I know my Dad wouldnt want me dragging this stuff around either. I'll keep you posted on how it works out. xxK

Between the black and white

Hi Friends,

Today is Thursday. It has been 3 weeks since that Thursday. It feels like it has been 100 weeks. It feels like it has been years since that Thursday, years counted in sleepless nights, restless nights, tears, no tears, sadness, and anger. When people ask me how I am doing I am not even sure what to say? I want to say I'm standing here aren't I? That about sums it up. I am standing. I am doing what I am supposed to. Getting thru it. Putting one foot in front of the other...moving...maybe moving slow but moving.

I have been going to a shit load of meetings. Tons of meetings. I realized that meetings are my church. Meetings are my sacred place. My place where everything around me stops and I can just be there with people who are also there. I feel very present in meetings and very grateful. Not just for the sacred place but for the fellowship, for the honesty, for the skills that I have learned from all of the people that surround me there. I spoke last night at a meeting and I told my story and included my most recent loss at the end. I wanted people to know me and who I am right now...I wanted them to know that it is because of the fellowship and the 12 Steps that I am sane at all in the last three weeks. It is because of the fellowship and my sponsor that I am at a job that I seem to love and that I can show up even when my heart is broken and be ok.

After the meeting last night a man approached me. Because I am getting used to people approaching me I just knew he was going to tell me that someone close to him had killed themselves. I could see it in his eyes, his kindness, his sympathy...he knew. I was right but what I didnt anticipate was that this man shared that this happened to him when he was young. I think he said his early twenties. His Dad was only 40. He said he drank for the next 20 years because of the pain, trauma,loss. He also said his father shared the BiPolar diagnosis and that he has come to see his father's death as a symptom of this mental illness. It struck me that this man appeared at peace. He didnot seem sad, angry, lost. He seemed to have acceptance.

Then it got strange because the man told me that he admired his Dad for having the courage to do it. I was totally speechless at this point not because what he said particularly surprised me but because I have gone over this point in my own head a good amount lately and it confuses me. Cowardice or Strength? Courage or Weakness? This man went on to tell me how he and his girlfriend argue over this. That she had been also close to someone who killed himself and that she saw at as cowardice, weakness, giving up. I finally stammered out that I just dont know. I dont. I dont know. I want to know but I guess this is one of those things you could debate indefinitely

Here is what I do know though. I know that my Dad saw suicide as courageous. He told me so. He told me that he viewed his own mother's suicide as courageous, he made it sound noble. I know that when he said this it terrified me. I know that when this man said it last night that it scared me too. What scared me? I am not totally sure. Black and white thinking scares me. Only seeing an act as how it affects me scares me. Not recognizing that our lives are connected to many many other lives really scares me. Isnt this just how we hurt and get hurt the most? When we fail to see how our behavior impacts others not just ourselves we fail. If I fail to see that my father's death though increadibly painful to me actually ended his own suffering than I am not seeing the whole picture. If he only sees his own peace and does not recognize my pain then he has failed me too. And so it goes.

We fail people that we love. The people that we love fail us. In a black and white world this would not happen. But I've always appreciated a nice gray myself. xxxK



 

Still Standing

Hi Friends,

Today is...Sunday and I just finished putting up the Christmas Tree. It was...fun? Though I confess to not really knowing what that even means. My new version of fun I guess is not my old version of fun. My new version of fun is I am not crying, I am not totally numb, l am not totally sad, I am not actively fighting tears. I am almost in the moment. I am almost connected. Or I at least want to be. I have the desire to be connected. I vaguely have the desire to be present. I want to be doing better. I am still so irritable, so sad, so...almost, but not quite, decimated.

How I feel today is that the phrase One Day at a Time might be the most wise and brillant phrase of all time. This morning I woke up for a little while and seemed to have forgotten what happened. I was lying there sort of waking up and then I remembered--and it was just a strange thing to remember your own pain. It is sort of better when I am thinking of it right when I wake up. I am not sure why this is but I will say that the phrase that get me out of bed is One Day at a Time. Each morning since my new normal my feet have hit the floor and I have thought--I can do this, just for today, I can and will.

Anyway, tonite my son said to me that it was not fair that adults get to do whatever they want. This simple phrase almost caused a full blown breakdown except that since he was referring to my not allowing him more Hannukah gelt it was sort of funny. But his little face, pouting, looking mad, throwing himself on the sofa--saying its not fair that adults get to do whatever they want really knocked the wind out of me. I said, Sam, I really know just how you feel. And that's the thing with losing a parent that I realized tonite--it makes you feel like a little kid. And that is how I feel. Like a small child who wants to throw an adult sized temper tantrum because it really is not at all fair that adults get to do whatever they want. This is true even more when the adults getting to do whatever they want are your parents, and really  even more true when what they are doing is jumping off of a bridge on Thanksgiving Day while you sit unknowingly somewhere eating Turkey.

So there it is for me and my day. Did I get up and go buy a Christmas tree today? Yes, I did. Did I get ready for and attend my mother in laws super nice and sweet Latke Party, Yes. Did I sit and eat and act normal and make small talk. Yes and yes. I learned I can do all of these things. I can play normal. I can pretend with the best of them. Inside am I still screaming in the backyard at the starts? I am screaming No, No, No but on the outside I am and will continue to be yes. Why? Because Yes is where it is at for me. Yes, this did happen. Yes, I do have to accept it. Yes, I do have to still be a parent to my own children. Yes, I still have to be a wife. Yes, I still (thankfully) have to be a daughter and sister too. Yes, Yes, Yes. Is it hard? Yes. Does it hurt? Yes. Am I doing it anyway? Yes.

Thanks for listening friends and hope someday this makes more sense or any sense. xxK