Pressure Cooker

I find I have no emotional reserves anymore. The least little issue sends me into an emotional tailspin of epic proportions and leaves me feeling drained and useless. Cooking dinner is an obstacle to be overcome. If dinner needs to be cooked AND I need to run to the store for air filters in the same night, I'm overwhelmed. Throw in a daughters smashed car window and I'm nearly comatose in my inability to function.

Handling every day life is all I can do, and if there are other things going on I find myself completely avoiding Josh's suicide. Shutting him out the best I can. The longer I do that though, the more insistent the thoughts become. So I stuff them down even harder. I pack my mind like a canning jar... a memory of his smile here, the way he smelled there, then cram the mental image of the fine downy hairs on the nape of his neck in between the two and screw on the lid really really tightly. Then, just like a jar of pickles, stick it in the cooker and turn up the heat. Before you know it, I'm ready to explode without provocation or explanation.

It doesn't help that during a time when I could really stand to have some serenity in my life it feels as if I'm holding out my plate and saying "Higher and deeper please...."

Currently, my brother-in-law is living with us rent free, my daughter is pregnant and moving back in a couple of months, my 23 year old son is in Portland for the Summer and I won't see him for his birthday for the first time, my job is stressful, money is tighter than it's been in 10 years, my husbands business is floundering due to the economy and we're trying to do a re-finance on the house.

That's where I am right now. I need desperately to find time to honor and acknowledge my on-going pain. I need to have a good cry and allow myself my sorrow and my memories, but there never seems to be enough time in the day because I'm currently so inept at handling the smallest of details. I feel continuously as though I need to be doing other things.

Catch 22

The pressure's building and there is an explosion eminent.

Pain

And just like that, it's over.

This first holiday has been hurdled and the next is creeping up upon me. Thanksgiving wasn't too bad really, but the day before was horrendous. I cried all day and felt such darkness and despair I could hardly breathe. The intensity of my grief was frightening and I found myself reliving the days immediately following his death. The desire to die in order to stop the pain was a repeating thought and it saddened me even more to recognize that Josh had to have felt the same level of pain, and more, to have acted on that desire. My poor baby.

Today, I am once again finding it hard to stop crying. It's strange. I'm not thinking of anything in particular, yet the tears continue to come. Some place deep inside of me is broken, torn apart, wounded... seeping continuously in an effort to heal. From one moment to the next I have no earthly idea how to cope with the pain, gripping desperately to the idea that it will abate, knowing it will become more than I can bear if it doesn't.

I go through the motions of life, holding hands with death. My loyalties to each pulling me in different directions, not sure which is winning from one moment to the next. I want to be with him, I want to be with my other children and my husband. I want the hurt to end.

Oh Josh, I don't want you to be in pain anymore, I just want my own to stop and I don't know how to reconcile the two desires in my one heart.