Sunday, March 13, 2005

Grief Progress Report

I am very tired, I usually wake up tired and drained. doesn't matter if I went to bed early.

Friday was the first day in the past couple of weeks where I actually felt halfway decent (nowhere near normal, but normal has now been changed). I have found solace and comfort in taking up gardening. I find joy in starting seeds and watching nature take over from there, seeing the seeds burst open with new plants finding their roots. Things are still strange and surreal, but I also understand that when a person goes through an emotional trauma such as loss, the brain rewires itself as a reaction to deal with the loss. Thus the forgetfulness, the emotional drain and tiredness, the short temper. Normal has to be re-defined and it will take awhile. The French give a person a mourning period of a year and I think that's fair. I should be allowed to be sad for about a year.

I just don't feel very personable or sociable right now and nobody should take it personally. It's simply how things are until I get my bearings back. This kind of thing really screws your brain and thinking process up. My only wish is that I had the luxury of being able to take a leave of absence from work for about 3 or 4 months. I really need it to get my head back together. But as things are, I do not have that.

I am convinced that my mother wanted to die. Her increasingly worsening condition, detereoration without any hope of recovery led her to wish for the relief of death. She had been caught a couple of times at the home she was in, fallen out of her wheelchair, having hit her head and on other occasions, observed to lean far from her chair, in the general area of being able to hit her head. I think these were attempts, although feeble, at killing herself. Whatever misery she suffered made her long to die and at last she had it. Now her misery is at an end and she doesn't suffer.