What’s Keeping Me Here?

Day 669.

What keeps me here, alive? (If you can call this living)

It’s not all the things for other people like I can’t hurt my Mum like I’ve been hurt, I can’t hurt George, I can’t hurt Adam etc. It’s for me.

I am still here for selfish reasons because I don’t want to miss the life of George. I can be with him, touch him and feel him in my fingertips and he can feel me. I can drink in his smell, we can interact. To take myself to the other side of mortality, leaving me unable to touch George or participate in his life, would, for me, be awful.

It strikes me that Luke would maybe be reluctant to show me the proof of afterlife incase it encourages me to join him, and I have thought of little else these past unbearable months.

And so, if I am steadfast in my resolve to remain, not for others, but for ME - Maybe Luke will come to me. Join me, here in whatever form he can.

I see the book selling slowly but surely on my Amazon report - that my story, our story, goes out to many, now beyond our friend circle. And so I wonder what it brings to them.

I hope it touches them. Holds their hand in a time of terror. “You went to hell and brought back coals to warm people,” I am told. And that makes it worth something.

So how do I make more of my life (as I slowly kill myself with cigarettes)?

“A grief doula!”, dear Jesse, another grieving Mamma suggests, with all the gallows humor we share in our tragedies. “We can do it together. They can choose between the Mom of a five year old killed in a boating accident and the Mum of a 23 year old who took heroin and died. We offer a varied range of doulas already.”

In truth, we already do this, healing ourselves in the service of others and I know there will be more.

So, I’ll close now and sit here in my secret life - and wait.