Sunday is the worst day of the week. For almost two months now, we’ve been grieving the loss of my mother-in-law; killed in a freak car accident on Sunday, June 7. Yesterday, my cousin’s husband found my Uncle Mark’s truck and with it, our worst-case-scenario was confirmed. When I go to Mark’s funeral it’ll be the second family member we’ve buried in as many months. It’ll be the second funeral my son attends before he’s even a year old. I was just starting to feel like I was functioning normally again after Linda’s accident but now, that’s all gone. I am falling apart so quickly that I don’t know if I’ll be able to regain control.
I’m not good at dealing with emotional attachments and loss. Throughout my teenage years and early adulthood, before I diagnosed and treated my depression, I pushed anyone and everyone out of my life. I figured that if I pulled myself in behind impenetrable walls the only one who’d be able to hurt me was myself. If I never really got close to anyone and severed any emotional bonds I had with people then I wouldn’t be hurt when they were no longer part of my life. It wouldn’t matter because they were the “red-shirts” in my life’s drama; the expendable, bit players.
Post-divorce, when I really started to come to terms with the depression I’d known for most of my life, I began doing things for me. I had a lot of friends and family who helped me along the way, in more cases than I care to discuss in this post, and I started to take down the emotional barriers I’d built all those years ago. There was a new and improved Sally model running around out there but I think she’s about to get a recall.
My sanity and stability are hanging on by the most tenuous thread. I’m worried about how all of this emotional trauma lately is going to affect my job performance and ability to function overall. Both of us work, with my job bringing in more than my husband’s. The economy is rocky, gas and food prices are unpredictable, taxes are rising and we can’t afford for me to miss work. I’m already negative vacation time from borrowing the time I needed for Linda’s services. I’d really like to accrue some vacation time that I can use for activities that don’t involve death.
I’m torn. I know I should probably seek out a professional and have some conversations. I even think I know a few of the topics to cover:
- The stress I have over financial matters and the fact that I’m consistently telling myself that I don’t have the time or the money to go to sessions. I leave for the office around 7:30-7:45 each morning (ideally) and I’m not home again until 7:00 or later each night.
- The feelings I have about not really knowing my mother-in-law before she died. She was helping us raise our son and I don’t feel like I was ever able to thank her for how involved she was with him. When we got to the hospital and learned she was dead, my immediate thought was “who are we going to get to watch Travis on Thursdays and Fridays and how are we going to pay for it?”
- Feeling like I’m invading Linda’s privacy because I’m going through everything she owned and trying to decide what we keep and what goes. Is it fair to her that someone who’d only been involved in her life for four years decides what to keep, and in so doing, defines the material things we will remember her by?
- Feeling out-of-touch with my family enough that my own parents didn’t think to call me and tell me that Uncle Mark disappeared. I found out through a Facebook status update and immediately called my father to find out if anyone had thought to tell him his brother was missing. When he confirmed he’d found out the night before, part of me was happy that someone thought to contact him, but another part was angry that no one thought to tell me.
I don’t know how to grieve. I don’t know how to be happy. Right now, my body is alive but I am dead. I have dulled emotions. I’m not seeing what’s around me. It’s all a blank stare. I tried to go to bed about two hours ago but these tortured thoughts won’t let me sleep. I am hurt, I am lost, I am sad, I am angry. And I feel guilty, because I think that I have no right to feel this way. I wasn’t terribly close to my mother-in-law or my uncle, so why does it make me feel this way?
0 Responses to “Depression Confession”