It has been 1,946 days. How have I gotten here? I have no idea. I’ve exercised, read, worked. When your loss isn’t punching me in the mouth.
The emotional pits don’t get any better. Are they fewer? Probably. Are they less immobilizing? No. Many times a day I will still find myself just staring at something. A screen. A wall. Out into space.
I’ve read and explored all I can on this. This… traumatic loss. I’m not built for it. I think that’s established. Is anyone? Some have more “resilience” in the wake of something like this, from what I can tell. But I would like to do a true poll of the ones who know, on some level, even if obviously not intentional, they are, in fact, responsible. Is this subgroup “resilient”? Or are we all destined to wither away, either slow or fast, on this flagpole of grief.
And what of those quiet moments. Those fragments of life that, in loss, we’ve come to realize are everything about being alive? Do those not exist anymore? They certainly do. I can see this around me as life, in it’s absolute unwillingness to stop, keeps plugging along. People are aging, families are growing and shrinking. The world still turns. My heart is still broken. But I still exist, in some new form. I try to change my outlook. Sometimes it works for a moment. But then I realize that at some point, life hit a peak, and I didn’t know it. Of the new additions to it that are life affirming, it still doesn’t change the fact that someone is missing to enjoy it all with.
So I’m left in a spot where I’m not quite alive and I’m not quite dead. There are people around me who, it seems, would miss me. Losing you has changed me and ruined me. I don’t know who it would be, but what if me leaving would do that to someone else? How would I subject to them to that? Or hope to subject them to that?
So I stay. I drudge through the days, the weeks, the months and try to find the glimmers of light in this dark cave that my consciousness has become.
I love you Benjamin Oliver Hartman. And I haven’t been able to hold you in eons.