7 posts tagged “grief”

I saw Sex and the City (minor, possible spoilers ahead) tonight at the 12:01 a.m. showing with my sis and her boyfriend. Of course, I needed a 15 minute power nap in the car first while they went in and found seats, but hey, there's no shame in my game, I stayed awake and enjoyed the movie instead of being a sleepy grump-ass.

I'm not sure if the movie could stand lone. As a fan who did see all the episodes, I think I benefited from already having the characters developed and knowing their backstories. I don't think that newbies would get as much out of it--despite the very well done title sequence and intro that cleverly recaps the high points of the series, I don't think the events in the film would have as much impact if you hadn't been on the whole journey with the girls. [The best way I can describe it is this. Imagine that you read The Return of the King without reading Fellowship and Two Towers first. You would perhaps enjoy the action, adventure, and mighty feats of all the players in RofK, but would you understand their sacrifices and their growth? Would you know why Eowyn and Faramir's quiet love at the end was so important? Would you really understand why the magic and memory in Frodo's Morgul wound continued to plague him? I'm not sure that you would.]

That said, I think the film did do an excellent job of examining some big relationship issues--sex, trust, adultery, expectations, disappointment, forgiveness--in big ways.

There was a point about 1/3 to 1/2 through the film where I found myself quickly exiting the theater and seeking refuge in the bathroom for the second time in my life, also the second time in the last year. (The last time was during Knocked Up. There's a post in my archive somewhere about that.) It wasn't so much a sequence or a scene that set me off, but rather just a look. It was the expression that Carrie has on her face when she removes her large sunglasses and looks at her reflection in the mirror. The look in her eyes, on her face, well, Miss Sarah Jessica Parker nailed the shock and exhaustion that comes with a certain kind of pain that I know a little about. (I really am trying not to spoil it, especially for friends who I know read this, are SATC fans, and haven't seen the movie yet.) What I saw, or rather, what I recognized was an expression that I knew very well at one point, and that stayed in my eyes for a long time.

So I bolted to the bathroom in tears, surprised and embarrased and confused at my reaction. Leaning my weight into my hands against the stall door, I cried as a montage of images of my own 'love lost' reflection in the glass flashed through my head. After a moment, I realized how very strange it was to be crying like that. I hadn't cried about it in a long time. Harder days than others, sure, but nothing more than a little melancholy. And thus began my inner dialogue: "Why are you crying?...Do you miss him?" Sort of, I guess, but not him now, I miss him then. "Do you want him back, is that it?" No, not exactly. "So why are you crying?" It was her face. I recognized her face, and I remembered the pain. "So, it's not the pain, but the memory of the pain?" Keep talking. "Well, what are you feeling? Are you in pain right now? Do you feel bad? Or do you feel bad that you once felt that bad?" And then it clicked. I took a breath and stopped crying. I didn't feel bad. I wasn't in pain. I was just remembering what it had been like, and I could snap myself out of it.

It was just a movie, and it did its job. It touched me, but that's it. So, I dried up and went back to the theater and watched the rest of flick...and really liked it.

[I'm home now and taking a few minutes to write again so that I get my intial impressions down. There's one more bit of news: did you know they have remade The Women? It's a classic b&w with Norma Shearer and Joan Crawford in the lead roles. The dialogue is great, it's over the top--and I think it's pre-code too--and though they figure into the story, not a single male character ever appears on screen. It's one of my favorites, and I recognized the plot just a few seconds into the teaser trailer. I'm not sure if I should be pleased or appalled. Methinks that a version with Meg Ryan and Eva Mendes in the leads isn't going to have quite the same dramatic impact as the first film. But I'm still going to go see it.]

I was telling my best friend last night how I still truly believe that he could walk back in the door at any moment...how I do believe we could move past this and count this time apart as a great trial, but that divorce is not what was meant for us.

He left one year ago today. The pace of work had led me to overlook the timeline briefly, but he brought it back to my mind this morning.

Something compelled him in the last several days to reach out with a couple of brief email notes, the last one near midnight. He seems to want to commiserate on this as some sort of shared anniversary, a milestone if you will, and I'm not certain why. Perhaps it's just the nature of my still healing self right now, but I read his words and chafe again at his casual remarks..."hard to believe it's been a year...tomorrow will be a year, I remember where we were and how tomorrow would inevitably play out." I replied that inevitable is not the word I would have chosen, and I left it at that.

I'm not sorry I've believed...I'm not sorry I've been straddling past, present, and future with this faith...and I don't feel that believing, even as I do now, is wrong. Truly anything is possible, and what is a little misplaced faith in the long run. I still have my moments of anger, but they are almost always expressions of pride bucking against humility, followed by tears when I release the tension and just accept the grace that lets me say that I forgive him and I love him even as I disagree with his decisions.

I've lived as fully in this moment as I can, and I owed it to myself to do it, but soon it will be time to count the moment passed...and to live fully in the next.

While it's been coming down all day, it suddenly seems rainy inside and out. I need to rant, so heads up.

As I've stated before, I strongly dislike that I am in the position of being the one to move this divorce along. While my husband is otherwise occupied with running for office (a move I have already expressed my opinion on) and continues to blame the attorney he capriciously picked out of the phone book for not responding, I get an email today wondering what the delay is on my end.

But here's the rub, if I don't move it along, it may linger on endlessly. If I do move it along, I get to throw up in my mouth a little bit every day at being complicit to this unwanted end.

As I've been writing this out though, I'm wondering whether this is really the best approach to take. Maybe I should just take a deep breath and stick with the attitude that I'm doing what's best for me--financially, if nothing else--by finishing this and taking ownership of it.

This is my divorce. This is my divorce. This is my divorce.

This is something I want.

No. No it's not. Those words stick in my throat just writing them out.

I don't want it, but I have it. I've done everything I can to push it away, to put it off, to hope for more time, time that might change his mind and his heart. It's still here.

He's just not who I thought he was...whatever else may have happened between us...no matter how I hurt him and he hurt me...he didn't love me enough...he didn't love me enough to forgive me those hurts...he didn't love me enough to see past them.

I'm going to want this. I'm going to force myself to want this. I'm going to force myself not to want him.

I'm going to give up.

I'm going to give up.

I'm going to give up.

I love being an adult. This morning I woke up, did a ten minute yoga program (babysteps, people), poured a cup of coffee from my new coffee maker, started working from home in the sunlight of my kitchen and then...I had a slice of yellow cake with chocolate frosting for breakfast. Lacking nutrition? Yes. Fuckin' delicious? Word.

About the coffee maker...my 12-cup Gevalia coffee maker, with auto-brew timer, arrived a few days ago, along with two packages of premium coffee, all for the low membership first time delivery fee of $10! Of course, they were hoping I'd forget to cancel the membership or be so enamored with their coffee that I'd feel an auto-ship program was worth said membership. But they were wrong! I canceled that membership the day after it came. I have outsmarted the free gift system! (And while I AM on a tight budget, a $10 coffee maker plus coffee, that included shipping too (!), was too good a deal to pass up. Plus, the last time my dad was in town, I felt like a terrible hostess...Him: "So, mija, you don't have a coffee maker, do you?" Me: "No, why? Oh..." Duh. Dad always starts his day with coffee. He drove to Starbucks the next morning for his fix! Pop was especially pleased to hear that when he and mom come up next weekend, I have both coffee and coffee maker waiting.)

About the yoga...I suck at it. Yes, I know that it's not a competition, blah, blah, blah, but I really am dismal at it and the concentration it takes for me to attempt the positions seems to sap the attention I would normally put towards keeping my emotional shit together. In other words, I cry when I do yoga. Bizarre, no? Anyway, hours a day at the computer for, oh, my entire life have led to problematically tight shoulders, neck, lower back, and hamstrings--which means that yoga is one of the best things I could add to my fitness regime--and so I am actually trying to learn at home now. I'm having to modify the hell out of positions to accomplish them, but I do feel better now than the first time I tried this particular flow at home.

Funny story for the day: My friends' oldest girl, a three-and-a-half year old with a curly brown mop of hair and a fun, somewhat type-A personality that I would definitely call precocious, has had an enduring relationship with her chupón from babyhood. [FYI: A chupón (pronounced like choop-on) is a pacifier.] They've tried repeatedly to wean her from it, but now she's self-aware enough to argue reasons why she should be allowed to keep it, use it, etc. She particularly demands it at night before bed, and a lost chupón can be cause for a meltdown. Well, I got an IM today from her pop asking me to run over to the house and take something out of their mailbox--her chupón! It was in an envelope addressed to Santa Claus! I guessed that they had finally convinced her to give it up, and here's the IM conversation that followed.

Me [9:46 A.M.]:  so you're sending it to santa claus, huh?
The dad [9:47 A.M.]:  that's what she said this morning....that she was going to send it to santa claus
Me [9:48 A.M.]:  too cool.
The dad [9:48 A.M.]:  it was actually quite sad this morning....she was so excited and when we put it in the mailbox and walked off, she said, "i'll miss you chupón"

Pobresita! I can just see her toddling away and waving good-bye.

Bittersweet story for the day: When my VoIP phone was installed in the fall, the only working phone I could find in our collection of old technology was a cordless one with a kinda' crappy connection. The other one, another cordless with an answering machine, that I thought also worked was missing its electrical adaptor. Well, I found the adaptor in the garage the other day, and so I hooked it up. To my surprise, it was still holding 6 messages from the last time it was plugged in--over 5 years ago! Stupidly, I hit play. The first message is an accidentally recorded conversation between my husband and me...it was about one in the morning, he was out of town, and he was calling before he went to bed, just as we always did when we were apart. The conversation is funny and sleepy, terribly sweet, and the first, last, and most frequently uttered words are "I love you, Bird," each of us saying it to the other. We'd been married less than a year. I cried my eyes out on the office floor, phone at my feet, and wondered again, for a moment, how he could have left that behind. But c'est la vie...there's an end in sight, I hope. Still, I haven't been able to bring myself to erase the message. I haven't listened to it again, but I haven't let it go either. I think that's quite the metaphor for where I "am" right now.

my mom sighed emphatically over phone the tonight, referring to the metaphorical "where" I am today. And really, it's even nicer to look back and know that the worst was over long ago...to be able to pinpoint exactly when and where the "worst" really happened, and know that I have come so far.

It was about three weeks that I can roughly remember...I think I've written about them before. Have you ever been close to madness? I hadn't until then. I'd been depressed, upset, wounded and victimized at times, but I had never experienced anything like those weeks.

They started the Monday after he left. I went to the doctor, still sick with a sinus infection, still jet-lagged from my trip abroad that had ended only 4 days earlier, just 1 day before he left...it was now Easter Monday, and I had spent much of the holiday weekend dazed and ill, sleepless and tearful at my aunt's house. I had returned home just a few hours before my appointment to find that he had packed up all his things into a trail of boxes and black trash bags that wound from our closet, through the bedroom, down the hall and into the living room and kitchen. Photos pulled from their places on the walls, books taken from the shelves, the crystal decanters removed from the kitchen, except for the crystal drum that had been a wedding present to him from a friend. I can't remember how I went into town...I think some friends drove me.

I had made the appointment in the hopes of helping me keep it together well enough to finish my thesis. I sat in the waiting room, exhausted, surrounded by people, and recognizing curiously that I could not keep myself from crying. Not weeping, just crying continuously, staring straight ahead, tears rolling down my cheeks. I didn't seem to have any control. I felt...broken.

The doctor, who is still my doctor, was the kindest, nicest, doctor I've ever met. He sat down, looked me in the eyes and just listened as I told him briefly about my situation, my inability to either sleep or concentrate, and my need to finish my thesis project. He explained that since this was just the beginning, and who knew what would be coming down the pipe, we'd take it slow and concentrate on getting me through the thesis.

I took the full doses of the prescribed medications and managed to sleep a few hours each night. My mom came for a few days and helped me to clean the house, put things in order, and move his boxes into the garage. I kept a brave face for the most part, until the last day when the dreams began and I went to her in the morning, crying. She left that afternoon, and my final thesis work began.

I wrote when I could, went to work as I could, spent the evenings at a nearby cafe to write away from the house, and ate very little. I walked the dogs like clockwork, early in the mornings and in the evenings, enjoying the beauty I saw in the spring all around me. I tried to stay outside, away from home, or near the windows and the light.

Many times in those weeks when I was alone in the house or the car, in moments without distraction, the madness came...sudden crying turned instantly to screaming, shrieking, almost roaring...and my throat would hurt and my eyes sting for hours.

Night was the worst. I would spent the day coming to terms with the reality of his leaving, but at night my dreams and my heart betrayed me, and every sequence was just of daily life--the two of us together in the kitchen or the car--with no memory that he had gone. I woke from these dreams with hugh gasps of breath, realizing in an instant that they had tricked me. The pain would come, and in the dark, disoriented without my glasses, I would sob and scream, eventually rocking myself into a calmer state, but afraid to go back to sleep. I watched many sunrises from my back porch then, with one of the dogs curled sleepily at my feet.

I'd never heard anything like the sound of my screaming; it didn't seem like my voice, but it felt like I was trying to turn my insides out by force. In those moments I was completely without control, and afterwards I was afraid...I thought I was losing it...and losing myself.

Eventually, though, I found that the moments of peace from my morning walks stretched into graceful days. The screaming fits were fewer, my sleep sometimes blessedly dreamless, and I began to feel rested. Sadness didn't force me to cry uncontrollably. Instead, I could channel it, write about it, or even, at last, just brush it aside to be dealt with later.

The worst was only three weeks long, and since then each day has, for the most part, been a little bit easier than the last. There have been harder days than others, true, and difficult conversations and situations, but I am very far from madness now, and grateful to be so removed.

It's still difficult to find myself in this place sometimes. We're still in limbo. Still legally married, but long separated. He has not aggresively pursued the end, but made it clear not to interpret this as indecision. So now, when I never wanted this at all and still, even today, might be prevailed upon to take another course of action, I am having to be the one to follow through.

I want this time, too, to be over. I want to face whatever trauma the finality may bring, and then put it behind me with the worst of it all.

He hasn't responded. He hasn't acted. So I asked my attorney to move forward.

The court date is set, and the countdown begins. Whether through settlement, mediation, or court decision, I'll be divorced by April 7, 2008.

I thought I would be sad, and I was, but mostly I was just relieved. Tingling all over my body, like a rush of wind, I sighed from deep down. No screaming, no crying...just silence, just peace.

i've gone out on a limb with something. upon the reassurance of a most unlikely individual, i have opened communication again with my husband. i needed to...the separation is painful enough...and while no contact was good for a while, as was the anger, it's not like me. not anymore. it was eating me inside. i needed to get rid of it. and i needed to reach out and see if anything of my friend was still there.

and i also need to be able to look back someday without regrets, without wondering if i let my pride get in the way. so i made it clear the door is still open. i don't want a divorce. i never did. and i won't file or be part of a joint filing either. it has to be his decision, his full action, his responsibility.

it was hard, but good, to talk again and to be in his presence. the first time in months i have felt that way. i still hope, i still pray...for patience, for forgiveness, for both of us.

what you read earlier might be categorized as denial, then previously shock and depression

i skipped bargaining, mostly--i haven't really done that since saying prayers as a grade schooler anyway

then came depression again and did i mention terror?

but what you hear now is acceptance, or acknowledgment of reality

and, yes, you should also hear anger

so much for the sequence of things. it's only been a few days...though I HAVE always been a fast learner

someone has asked me, "could you take him back, after all this, what if months even years from now he wants to reconcile...could you be with him again?"

anger says "fuck no"

fear says "i don't know"

faith says "you don't have to be sure, but there is strength in forgiveness"

but really, i'm like miss scarlet. i just can't think about that now. i'll think about that tomorrow. and tomorrow. and tomorrow.

'cause i have lots of shit to do