Next Level

Day 991.

Imagining grief in layers.

You just start to cope with one layer.

You are functioning, the panic attacks are gone, your brain clears, you are driving, grocery shopping, organizing, socializing, laughing. You touch moments of joy.

and then ———— BOOM!

You’re right back where you started - panic attacks, fogged brain.

The simplest of tasks are insurmountable.

You can’t remember your passwords.

You can’t communicate effectively.

Your sadness is unbearable.

Your husband is frustrated with you constantly.

You sit in a room full of friends, alone, locked inside yourself.

Except you aren’t right back to the beginning, because the numb blanket of shock is no longer there to hide within, to block you from your feelings.

When you are inside that blanket of shock, you hate it and want out, want to be back in the world.

When all of your feelings come rushing at you again, you mourn that blanket, because it protected you from too much pain, from expectation.

Expectations of being able to function.

You can’t function. But you have been functioning, so you’re expected to continue.

You reach a new stage, and everything is hard again.

You have been excelling at your level. But then you graduate to the next. The next level is harder, and so like reaching a new level of education, or a video game, you are on new ground, you are once again in the unfamiliar, tool-less and inept.

This is where I am now.

Was it triggered by Luke’s birthday?

Another birthday that he was not at.

Is it the new level of realization?

Is it just exhaustion from bearing the load of his loss?

Or has yet another veil of shock lifted, to reveal new reality?

Adam too is suffering, and yet I don’t seem to offer him anything, and so the fighting, the hopelessness, returns.