I went exploring around my new neighborhood.  I felt myself kind of flagging later in the evening, so I decided to try to perk myself up by going to AJ’s and getting some healthy and overpriced food.  I went to the one at Baseline and Val Vista, which I wouldn’t have previously considered my neighborhood but which is now only 3 miles away.  I was sort of excited by some of the businesses I saw around there - there was a “Sauce” pizzeria and a nice Paradise Bakery and a Wildflower and some other things.  It was a nice way to kind of expand the possibilities of new places I could frequent.

Anyway, I went to AJ’s and got some salad and peaches and sushi and stuff like that.  Came home and put it all away, watched some Dr. G (God, I love her) and some Kardashians (God, I love Bruce Jenner).  Decided to hit the hay early.

And then I had a bout of the most Godawful nightmares!

Not about Conrad and Max this time, but very awful anyway.  And they were those nightmares where you know you’re having a nightmare, and you’re trying to wake up, but you can’t.  Like literally I was trying to pry my eyes open and I just couldn’t and was trapped in this nightmare world.

So I finally did manage to wake up around 2:30, and I was drenched in sweat and I’m sure I’d been making all sorts of noises.  When this used to happen, I had told Conrad that if I made any noises in my sleep, that he must wake me up because I was probably trying to wake myself up and unable to.  But of course now that there was no one to do that, I was probably moaning and yelping to the air for like, hours.

I got up and went to the couch in the living room and turned on the TV.  Not to watch TV but to go back to sleep in a brightly lit room with the TV going.  So that’s how I made it through the rest of the night.

Not too fun!

And now I feel all off this morning.

However, Amy came over for morning coffee which was great.  It’s funny how I have different things in common with each of my friends, and have different things each of them can relate to.  She and I had a really good talk, and it was nice and low key which was good because I am slumping a bit today, not feeling quite as ebullient as yesterday and needing to stay closer to home.

I could feel myself sliding down the slippery slope last night as I was going to bed, which was probably why the nightmares started.  It’s funny, it’s like I’m balancing on the edge of a big bowl, and sometimes I can actually feel my mood suddenly slip on a dime down inside.  It’s like, “Uh oh, wait, no . . . no . . . ohhhh!  Damn.  There it goes.”

After a couple days of feeling normal I guess it was bound to happen.  Damnit.

But at least it didn’t happen till the end of the day.  I’ve had countless mornings where I’ve woken up, felt okay for all of two minutes, and then - sloooop.  Down the inside of the bowl, where I’d remain all day.

Guess I’ll go back to Dr. G now.  After watching her do tons of autopsies, one thing has become quite clear to me, which I will share now:  STAY ON TOP of your oral hygiene!  It’s really scary how many people end up getting lethal bacterial infections and stuff that end up in their lungs or heart and killing them, and they actually started with bacteria in the mouth from unchecked dental problems.  I always thought of tooth problems as purely aesthetic, or maybe painful complications where you have to end up getting dentures or whatever, but no!  You can, like, die!

I’m going to call my dentist soon.  Very soon.  Well, somewhat soon.  It’s hard to get excited to go to the dentist.  But Dr. G is scaring me straight.

Looking forward to not laboring at all this Labor Day.

And I think the tide is turning, just a little bit.

Let’s not get all excited and throw a pinata party.  I’m not walking around the town on wings of happiness.

But, here and there this past week, for the first time, I’ve had a few bouts of feeling - well, almost normal.  At work, taking care of business, going home, shopping, seeing friends, now and then I’ve had moments of well-being and hope.

I went to a group on Thursday for “Survivors of Suicide.”  It wasn’t like, ahhh, this is what I’ve been looking for, now all my problems are solved.  But it was sort of nice to be around people who are going through this particular melange of bereavement and bewilderment.  They were all ahead of me - at least a year into their aftermaths.  It was significant that they were all still in need of a group.  But it also was edifying to see how the thought processes both change and remain the same as time goes on.

I’ve started eating healthier.  Well, except today when I was forced to go to McDonald’s because Wendy’s was out of baked potatoes.  That really pissed me off because it’s happened to me several times now.  You’d think if a place continually ran out of a certain item, they’d, I don’t know, stock more??  Not so.

And I actually worked out for 20 minutes on my elliptical today, for the first time in months.  I hope to get back to that state of physical shape I used to be in, where I thought nothing of doing it for an hour at a time.

I haven’t been smoking.

Much.

Last night I had a nice dinner with a couple new friends.  I didn’t have a single drop of alcohol and yet managed to feel in the moment and like myself, in a good way.

Today I had a friend going through a hard time and I got to go support her for a while.  This was huge for me.  It feels good to finally be able to give back to somebody a little bit, after basically feeling like everybody’s biggest charity case for four months.  And, I’m feeling strong enough that I actually feel like I have something to give.

After months of feeling uncomfortable and miserable no matter what I was doing, I’m finding moments of feeling comfortable with people in social situations, AND feeling comfortable by myself.  I don’t have to necessarily take a Xanax to knock myself out because I can’t stand being alone with the memories.

I still have all the anger and wretched feelings, I just think maybe they’re starting to take a more proportional place in my everyday life.

I don’t want to get too carried away with it, because who knows, tomorrow I could wake up wishing I didn’t have to.

But - I may just be turning a tiny corner.

I have a total girl-crush on Dr. Jan Garavaglia, of “Dr. G: Medical Examiner.”  I just think she’s the coolest.  She’s what I always wanted to be but never was actually cut out to be.  She’s in a position of massive responsibility, cool as a cucumber, smart as a whip, tough and tender at the same time.  I love her unflinching determination and dedication to her work.  I love how empathetic she is and how sensible.  She’s quite wise.

I’d go on but these damn kids outside are distracting me a bit.  This is one drawback I’ve found to my apartment.  It is situated such that the kids are almost always playing directly outside.  Now if it’s 6 year olds playing, that’s one thing.  But when it’s obnoxious seventh graders yelling profanities, that’s another.

Says the woman currently wearing her New Orleans souvenir t-shirt that proclaims “Fuck you, you fucking fuck.”  Ha!  I never wear it outside the house.  It’s so inappropriate.  But I kind of love it.

I just realized it must seem like I wear nothing but profane shirts.  This and the one I previously mentioned a couple entries back are the only ones I own, I swear.

I had stress nightmares last night, when I finally got to sleep.  I was in The King and I, but not the version that I was actually in back in the summer of 2007.  But it was similar in that I was somehow expected to be in a number of dance routines, and was of course failing miserably.  I woke up with my body stiff as a board and covered in sweat from the tension.

And incidentally, may I just say that when I think about what I now know was going on when I was doing that show that summer, I want to throw up until my insides bleed.

I have actually been having some stomach problems that won’t seem to go away.

It’s probably due in no small part to me desperately needing to revamp my diet.  I think I’m finally ready to stop the insanity.  Now I’m not going to actually go on some kind of weight-loss regime yet.  I just want to start making healthier choices, so that when I feel like crap, I know it’s because of life stuff and not the damn french fries I stuffed down my gullet.

I did something very uncharacteristic of me but necessary, I think.  I found a support group.  I’m not really a group person, but I find my situation so weird and specialized that I decided I needed to find a group of people who’ve been through not just loss, but loss in the particular way that I’m going through.

I haven’t gone yet.  Later this week.  We shall see.

It had actually crossed my mind, during a really dark moment, to seek some inpatient treatment.  There are a lot of drawbacks to doing that but sometimes when it’s really bad, you just think, “Well, shit.  Maybe I do need to be . . . somewhere.”

Well, I looked up a few different somewheres, and you know, I don’t really want to disrupt my life doing all that stuff.  I don’t think it’s to that point.

The support group thing is sort of a compromise.

So that, and the fact that I went to work today and pulled it off without losing either my cookies or my sanity, lead me to define today as a success.

OK.  Let’s see what Dr. G is tackling next!

But here’s what I guess I’ll be honest and say.

It is NOT okay.

If you ask me how I am and I say fine, I’m saying it because many times, you just have to.  You have to get through the moment and make the niceties.  And no, I guess if I’m not going to slash my wrists or burst out sobbing at that moment, in a sense it is fine.

But I won’t be able to fake it all the time.

And it seems more healthy, at a certain point, to say, “You know what?  It is absolutely not, in any way, shape or form, okay.  It is NOT over.  It is just beginning.  It is ongoing.”

If you don’t own up to that at some point, it seems like you’re not going to get anywhere.  You’re going to perpetuate it, and die slowly from the inside.

It isn’t okay.

I’m not just grieving.  I’m under attack.  From the one person in the best position to truly attack me.

I’m not going to say I’m not.  And I’m not going to be able to explain it to anyone.  They’ll just have to take my word for it.

I will keep my apartment dark, with not a single light or open curtain, for 24 hours at a time if I have to.  I will get a sickness, as I did on Friday, and I will earnestly pray to God that it is something fatal.  I will curl up in the fetal position at 9 a.m. after all I’ve done so far is take a shower.

I will do these things because it is most absolutely and assuredly not okay.  And I don’t think I’m defective for saying that.  I don’t think I’m weak.  I think it would be weaker to deny it, bury it, overlook it for the sake of others’ comfort.

People say “anything I can do to help.”  Well, in order to know what kind of help I need, I have to own up to the fact that I’m not fine.

Now, I will sweat it out sometimes.  I will tell jokes, pay bills, get things done.  Sometimes, maybe even most of the time.  As much as I can.

But not all the time.  Not yet.  And I won’t beat myself up for it.

Because . . . say it with me now:

It’s not okay.

We were just watching TV and all of a sudden she gets this urgent desire to go to Wal-Mart.

The problem was, I was not in acceptable going-out clothes.  I was wearing my grubby shorts and my Spring Awakening t-shirt, which says “There’s a Moment You Know . . .” on the front and “You’re Fucked” on the back.

It’s a song from the show.

But, Alyssa convinced me that it’s Wal-Mart, nobody cares.

So I found myself at Wal-Mart at 9:45 p.m., no purse or anything, with a shirt on that said the F-word.

Someone alert PeopleofWalMart.com.

While I was talking to Alyssa I found myself saying something that I hadn’t even articulated to myself.

There are so many reasons that I feel betrayed, abandoned, you name it.  Reasons to remember Conrad with nothing but anger and bewildered hatred.  In that spirit, I have spent the past few weeks refusing to love him. 

But the problem is, I miss loving him.  I miss our friendship. 

Part of me truly believes he deserves to have me hate him forever.  Let my righteous indignation dictate the way I see him for all the years to come.

But the thing is, he isn’t here.  So I can’t yell at him, can’t hammer things out with him.

All I can do is choose whether to spend the rest of my days harboring hate, or whether I want to continue to love him.

I want to go to sleep at night smiling sometimes, because he loved me.  I want to enjoy the memories we shared, believing he loved me while we made them.  If I believe he didn’t, then they all mean nothing.

But, the things he has done are, in my mind, completely inconsistent with how you behave toward the one you love and share your life with.  They are things that have shattered me, irreparably.

How can you love someone who has done what they knew would shatter you?

I do have my pride.  If you decide to accept or overlook the inherently unacceptable from someone, you’re setting your pride aside.  Even though he has died, that doesn’t mean my pride doesn’t and shouldn’t still have a voice.  If I can’t express that voice to him in argument, I feel the need to express it through the way I remember him.  He doesn’t deserve to be remembered fondly.

But I also don’t know if I deserve to live with all the bile that hating him forever would involve.

I left the house yesterday after getting the very last things out of the garage.  It’s now officially empty.

I’m going to have to live with the pain of that emptiness forever.  Isn’t that enough pain, without adding to it with constant rage?

Logical, yes.  But . . . you can’t just decide how to feel and then feel that way.  So I don’t really know how it’s going to shake out in the end.  Maybe I’ll always be this conflicted.  

I wanted to love my husband with purity, as I always did, and now it’s all muddled.  I resent being put in this position.  But, here I am. 

I feel like I want to punish him with eternal hatred.

But I also want to make sure that in punishing him, I’m not really punishing myself. 

A friend sent me this poem, and it is so spot on that it’s scary.

Please Be Gentle
By Jill B. Englar

Please be gentle with me for I am grieving.
The sea I swim in is a lonely one
and the shore seems miles away.
Waves of despair numb my soul
as I struggle through each day.
My heart is heavy with sorrow.
I want to shout and scream
and repeatedly ask ‘why?’
At times, my grief overwhelms me
and I weep bitterly,
so great is my loss.
Please don’t turn away
or tell me to move on with my life.
I must embrace my pain
before I can begin to heal.
Companion me through tears
and sit with me in loving silence.
Honor where I am in my journey,
not where you think I should be.
Listen patiently to my story,
I may need to tell it over and over again.
It’s how I begin to grasp the enormity of my loss.
Nurture me through the weeks and months ahead.
Forgive me when I seem distant and inconsolable.
A small flame still burns within my heart,
and shared memories may trigger
both laughter and tears.
I need your support and understanding.
There is no right or wrong way to grieve.
I must find my own path.
Please, will you walk beside me?

Now that I’m settled in the new apartment, I feel like it’s a boat.  I’m on the boat, floating far away from the rest of the world. 

Last night I was drinking some wine and noted that the glass had “The Hitching Post” etched into it.  I immediately flashed to the trip where we got that glass.

Conrad and I went alone, without Max, and drove up the California coast.  We diverted to the area where Sideways, one of our favorite movies together, was filmed.  We went to all the places the characters in the movie went, and stayed in the same motel.  It was one of our more romantic trips together.

We used to love to take road trips.  I have video of many of them now, sitting in my apartment’s hall closet. 

You know, I always had a feeling that I was going to lose my husband.  He had some heart problems and other health issues.  They weren’t bad enough to die from at a young age, but still - I just always sort of had this foreboding feeling, and a terror of him dying.

I never dreamed, though, that when that terrible day came, my worst fears would not only be realized, but surpassed.

How many weeks has it been since May 7th?  Fifteen and a half.

Fifteen and a half weeks really isn’t that long. 

I look ahead at my life.  How much longer will I live?  Forty, fifty years?  And all of them will be years without Max.  Years wondering how he would have changed and grown.  Years without his big teenager shoes being scattered around the house.  Years I won’t have to keep up with his young man’s appetite, going to the grocery store every other day.  Years I won’t be worrying about the emergence of his sexuality, his job prospects, whether or not he will be able to live on his own.

I was perfectly prepared to spend forever taking care of him, if that was what I needed to do.  I almost looked forward to it.

I’m not prepared to spend forever with this wondering, looking at the pictures of my son on the wall as they age, the image of him remaining forever seven years old.  I’m not prepared to spend forever with my son in a beautiful purple urn beside my bed.  I’m not prepared to spend forever explaining what has happened to people I meet, people I might date, my future children.  How will I tell a future child that he has a brother without also telling him the horrific end to the story?

But, forever has begun.  The boat has set sail and there is no way for me to disembark.

Maybe it seems like it’s been three months plus, and that’s a long time - but when you think of it as just the beginning of a life without Max, it really isn’t long at all. 

Long before there was a Max, a Conrad, or law school, there was just me and my own strong but muddled ambitions.

I was in Singing Hoosiers in college.  We were preparing for a concert and at one point, we were standing in lines around the auditorium, rehearsing our entrance to the stage up the various aisles.  It was the first time we had practiced this entrance, and had just been told how it was to be done.

But it was a little confusing. As the music played and the entrances began, I felt rising panic as I realized I was uncertain when to go.  I was to lead a line of people in and just wasn’t sure.

My time came and . . . I hesitated.

Our director just went off.  He screamed his head off at me.

“Will you stop looking around and get moving!”

I rushed to the stage at breakneck speed.

He still didn’t let it go.  He came up to the stage and berated me some more.

“If you make a mistake, then make a mistake, but don’t just stand there!”  He made a sneering imitation of me, exaggeratedly cringing with the uncertainty and hesitation.

It cut me to the quick.  That was the very essence of me.  Cautious, wanting to be sure I was doing the right thing before I plunged in.

I did not return to the group the following year.

While the payoff of performing was wonderful when you got it right, getting it wrong meant rolling eyes, screaming directors, tempers flaring, humiliation in front of talented people you respected.  Success would bring a momentary feeling of invincibility and superiority, but the blows to the ego in moments of failure were far deeper and longer lasting.

As I lay drifting in and out of consciousness tonight, dozens of such incidents from my life paraded behind my eyelids.

“You are not good enough.  You are an idiot.  You have failed again.”

I should have known, my mind would begin attacking itself from the inside, dredging up ancient memories of reproach after reproach, guilt after guilt.  This is what happens in times of stress.  I remember it happened with a vengeance when I was studying for the bar.

“The attack is psychological,” said the priest in The Exorcist.  ”The Devil mixes lies with truth.”

He uses your inherent guilt against you, they meant.

But you don’t need the Devil for that.  You’re perfectly capable of doing it all to yourself, by yourself.

I know that I need to forgive myself for all that I have done.  I have to forgive myself for the times I wasn’t a perfect wife and mother.  But it is so hard, in the wake of having it wrenched away, not to go back over all the times I wasn’t strong and wonder if they somehow led to this outcome.

So my mind is my greatest enemy the wee hours of this night.

I may or may not have failed my husband.  I may or may not have been there for my child as I should have been. I’m still working that out with my conscience.

But as my mind is all too gleefully quick to remind me, one thing’s for certain.  I definitely failed to walk up the aisle that day in rehearsal.  I screwed that up, so I probably screwed up other things too.

“Because that’s what you do,” my mind tells me.  ”You fail.”

I cannot listen.  It is only a trick of the mind.  But it’s a powerful one.

Rough, rough, rough week on the whole.  And when it culminated in twelve hours of nightmares about Max dying, only to wake up, feel the momentary relief of realizing it was only a dream, and then have the real-life nightmare set in that he is still, in fact, gone - it was definitely a final straw, off-the-deep-end kind of moment.

I dragged myself over to the house to oversee a couple of wonderful helpful people from the church who came to move my stuff into storage.  There wasn’t that much, but there was a washer and dryer, old case files, my wedding dress, some clothing of Conrad’s and Max’s.

I stood in the garage almost in tears - or maybe it was just sweat pouring down into my eyes from the 110 degree heat.

And just then something truly fortuitous happened.  Alyssa texted me.

There is something about Alyssa.  I trusted her with my son for hours and hours, year after year.  She knew him and loved him as family.  When she is with kids, I watch that Mary Poppins side of her come out.

Feeling as I do now, I have the irrational desire to have her take care of me, the way she took care of Max.

And in her way, yesterday she did.

She took me to Wal-Mart.

I’d been challenging myself to see how long I could go without basic supplies in my apartment.  Food, conditioner, and the like.  Finally the streak was broken.  I picked up food so I can actually eat something other than fast food, which was starting to make me sick.  I got conditioner.  I got some other necessities.  I began to feel a bit more like a civilized person.

And it’s hard not to be infected by her natural exultation.  She’s a person who can say, “We’re going to Wal-Mart!  Isn’t this awesome!?  Isn’t this the BEST thing that ever happened!!??”

She let me hang out with her all day. Just cleaning, hanging out, making dinner.  And as I did, I felt the clenching feeling in my chest finally, finally loosen.  For the day, I could finally breathe.

I didn’t have nightmares last night.  And at least for this moment, I’m not completely in despair over the fact that I woke up this morning.

Today my big project is to get the garbage out of my old garage to the curb for a bulk pickup.  This doesn’t sound like a big deal, but it kind of is.  There’s a LOT of stuff!  But, I have all day.  If I have to drag each thing one by one, then I will.  It’ll get done.

Just when I didn’t think I could go on for one more second, I went to Wal-Mart and found the strength to get through Saturday.  How about that.

Even my onetime friend, sleep, has turned on me.  I spent twelve hours having nightmare after nightmare, watching my son die over and over, in a myriad of ways.  Kissing his pale face goodbye.  When the dreams weren’t about that, they were about the loss of love - a love I now question I ever had.

Hell is being awake.

Hell is being asleep.

Hell is hating everyone that has a life, children, lovers.

Hell is not being able to stand being around people.

Hell is not being able to stand being alone.

Immediately that feeling which is becoming so familiar settled in.  The blackness so dark that I couldn’t escape it.

I shoveled in some food.  I keep thinking it’s going to give me the pleasure it once did.  It never does.  But I keep trying, hoping it will turn off the feeling just for a moment.

Then I took a Xanax and went to bed.

It was 5:15.

I wasn’t tired.  I just couldn’t stand to be conscious.  I couldn’t stand to be part of my own existence.

I was awakened once, at 10:30, by the sound of one of my cats puking.  They’re doing their best to ornament my new carpet with spots of vomit.  It feels like they are throwing up more since I moved.  Yuck.

This weekend Linda is coming.  Although I’m so drained and feel I won’t be good company at all, her presence will at least shake things up a bit.  I’m not so naive as to think it will be a distraction.

Nothing is a distraction anymore.

My therapist routinely asks, “Are you suicidal?”

No.  I don’t have nearly the energy and anger to dredge up that kind of act.

But when I’m not forced to be actively engaged in something, being conscious is just too unbearable.  This weight is too heavy.

In a way I feel dead already.  This isn’t living.  I remember what living used to feel like, and this isn’t it.  This is some bizarre half-life.

I’ll be keeping the good makers of Xanax in business for a while.