Monday, August 8, 2011

death: I hate you even more than cancer

I am not done.  Yep, still grieving over here.  If you tuned out for a few months and hoped I'd be done when you got back, bad news: Nope. Still heartbroken.  Still lonely. Still purposeless and adrift without the tether of my beloved four-legged best friend.  Still really and suddenly and constantly sad.  

I have spent about the last four hours soaking every available tissue with buckets of tears, just miserable over the loss of Jasper, over knowing I'll never lay eyes on his 3D self again in this plane, although I see him frequently in my dreams.  And I know it's completely idiotic to hate death, of all things. But I'm serious: I'm not going to pollyanna or sugar-coat this or say it's not my favorite.  I'm going straight for hate on this one.

Thanks to death and his bullshit, I am convinced that I'll never be truly happy in any kind of lasting way again.  Ever. 

That's crazy, right?  You can go ahead and say it.  You can go ahead and tell me I'm depressed, too, if you want to.  My only response to that is that yeah, DUH, of course, I'm depressed.  Obviously. 

But how not to be?  How depressing is it, really, that someone you love so much can exist, be doted on and touched and snuggled up and sung to for almost fourteen years, and then just vanish, just disappear?  How is that possible?  Believe me, I know intellectually how it's possible, and I can also tell myself a whole story about how he has just returned to the source, his molecules dissolving, reforming, etc., but it doesn't do anything for my heart.  My heart doesn't give a shit about any of that or about the rainbow bridge.  It just, I just want him back, I just crave a rewind of the last fourteen years of my life to any point in that timespan that had him in it, wagging, running, smiling with his entire body.

At least I never, not for one moment, took any of my time with Jasper for granted.

Used to be that it was cancer I hated with a vengeance, cancer who in one year grabbed Alex, and my sister, and Jasper briefly, then my Joe.  Cancer with its miserable darkness.  But death?  Hate it even more than cancer.

I know, I know that's silly.  I know I need to accept what is.  I need to square myself to what is.  But there's such a big part of me that sometimes just doesn't care, that doesn't see any real point.  And oh yeah, that big part that doesn't see the point?  That's my heart, the big broken part of me, the part that just can't right now do anything but grieve.

This is not a cry for help.  Don't be gross.  This is just me, keening, deep in my piles of sodden kleenex.  I get to do this, having lost someone I loved so much.  I suppose this is what happens when you love really big.  The pain of loss is equally big, expanding just like the love did, until it too vanishes, disappears beyond where the eye can see.

Miss you, miss you, miss you, Mr. Pillowsticks, sweet sweet Mr. Brown, Sharbles, Baby Cakes, every moment, every day.

2 comments:

Janna said...

Beautiful saddness. There us a yoga workshop centered in healing from our losses through yoga in Thursday. 6:00 I believe. I am trying to be there.

birdofparadox said...

I love this... the dreadful, wrenching honesty. So many times, we squelch these things, internalize them because it's inappropriate or unpopular. To live fully, we have to wade hip-deep into whatever we're handed.

I lost my mom to cancer 14 April Fool's Days ago. It had been so bad for so long that I welcomed death with such fierce gratitude. Death is harder to deal with when it's animals, because death often has to come at our word.

Love to you,
Deirdra