i am in hell
and i'm not feeling like much of a pacifist, either.
posted by laura at 11:22 PM
10 May 2005
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3 Comments:
Public Service Announcement: hell is real, but temporary.
I would love a gmail account of your personal hell, if you are up to it. Perhaps we could compare accounts and rewrite Dante!
i can't access gmail from work (those darn firewalls are back up!), but i can tell you that my hell is the realization that before hans was dead, he was alive. my hell is being unable to turn off the constant, automatic rewind of the moment we learned hans was dead, when we were staring at the flat lines on the ultrasound screen and then one of the techs that i didn't like too much said, i can't find anything. i live that moment over and over, and i can't stop it. my hell is having overwhelming violent urges but not being in the vicinity of anything that my conscience will permit me to beat. justin did offer yesterday for us to have a pillow fight, but after considering the strength of my violent urges, we decided it may not be safe. my hell is that i have no guarantee there will ever be a time when i won't be revisited by the horror of finding out that hans was dead so soon after knowing that he was alive. i almost can't live with it.
Hmm, yes, that sounds familiar, guilt and violence, a brilliant combination! I have a few moments that I re-live over and over; I do it less now and with less intense emotional reactions but I still do it. I also lived in the hell of 'what did i do wrong?' and 'why didn't I know she was sick? I suck as a mother!' and several other levels of hell besides those. Someone on TP suggested I break bottles against a wall as a way of being violent without hurting anyone but I didn't have a handy wall and I'd feel that I had to clean it up afterwards!
Unless you have advanced dementia of some kind as a really, really old lady (not something I wish for you, by the way!) you are always going to remember the day you found out Hans was dead; that is your new reality and you can live with it, you are living with it as horrible as it is. I think there may be something important about the re-living it in the early stages, maybe it helps cement the memory in a way that makes acceptance happen, so we don't end up in total denial pushing a baby carriage full of cats around the neighbourhood. I re-lived Strummer's birth and death every Monday afternoon for a few months, and we talked about it a lot and eventually it became a reality and a story (if that makes sense) and we are able to think/talk about it now in a way that makes meaning out of it instead of only bringing pain. It still brings me acres of pain when I tell it to myself, but I still feel real joy and gratitude about aspect of it.
You already know that there's no easy way to deal with all of this crap, do what you need to do. Maybe you should hang a punching bag in your basement, it sounds like Justin could use the exercise and you could use the stress release!
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