Day by Day

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I'm often still taken by surprise when being able to do some tasks are often a day by day proposition.  Mostly these are tasks to do with Ian, but not always. Often this freeze is not so much in the sense of having a 'bad' day, but just a day of not wanting to go there.

Just prior to Christmas I was working on swapping which rooms are used for what around in my house. In order to achieve the swap around I needed, I reached a point I had to do something with a pile of Ian's clothes.  This was his 'not much of this is in regular use' pile of clothes that took up a closet and a dresser, that I'd been ...umm...  asking... him to sort through for a good year, if not longer.

The first day of the swap around, there was no way I could have gone through the clothes and parted with them.  I was so frazzled simply trying to juggle stuff so we had room to work and paint, that it made trying to make decisions on keep/donate/toss just impossible and I would have been screaming like a banshee if I attempted it. 

But the next day, I was surprised how easy a task it was to work through a pile of clothes that, for the most part, I never saw Ian wear AND to actually make decisions on what to do with each individual piece.  I'd planned to pack them all away in a box or suitcase to be dealt with at a later time, but I found I could do the keep/donate/toss right then and there.

There were some items I kept aside as they did hold memories, but I still filled my trunk with clothes and was even able to take them immediately to an emergency assistance shelter so they could be used, rather than sitting in my house, frankly mocking me because he'd not done the sort out before he got sick. 

I've had a couple more days since where I've been able to work through a box here, folder there - I'm learning to grab them when they come; the desire to tidy the place up and de-clutter pre-dates Ian's illness and death, and is still there. 

It's just some of the decisions are harder.

Fear of Loss

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Fate handed me the early death of both my parents. These traumas have given my brain a pattern. The pattern is to assume that more bad things will happen. It's a brain that's attuned to signs of more death and loss. Eventually I realized that this trait held me apart from those I loved and caused me a ridiculous amount of anxiety, so I got to work on it.

I was working diligently on that facet of my brain with my therapist when Dave got sick and died, so my brain REALLY latched on to that pattern then. It was as if fate proved my progress a waste of time. I was learning to believe that not every illness led to death and then Dave's illness led to death. SEE! My brain said. I told you!

At this point now, alone, meaning without a life partner or a kid, I am free of such fear. I'll be scared shitless if one of my friends gets very sick, sure, but the person I was most bound to on this planet already got sick and died, so I don't have to fear that happening again. But that is predicated on the fact that I'll always be alone and that doesn't seem acceptable either. One is terrifying and the other is incredibly sad.

I understand now that the rest of my life will be a series of decisions. Each time I decide I can choose based on fear or love. Choosing based on fear means my life becomes small. Safe from more pain, but also devoid of love, adventure and meaning. Choosing love means I will have much to fear. I will think that my (imagined) beloved’s headache is a tumor and that he will not recover every time he gets the flu. If I were to one day have a child of my own, I will worry that every cough, sneeze, barf, or fever means that the end is near. But when I look at my two choices, how can I choose to forego getting and giving love? That would be another sort of death. My own. I’d be alive but not living.

Lately my mantra has been “fear makes terrible decisions”. I chant it to myself every time I feel my defenses slide down over my heart to protect me from imagined pain.When those defenses begin to shield me, I close up my life, smaller and smaller, until I'm very safe and very alone. So I fight it. If I even think fear is involved in a decision, I try to do the opposite it's telling me to do. I don't always succeed and sometimes the fear is overwhelming, but I try.

I remind myself of the regrets of the dying as often as possible. Fear based decisions seem to lead a person right to a list of those exact regrets. I don't want to regret.

But, there’s a very tired, broken, raw part of me that wants so desperately to stop being afraid. To have nothing left to lose. It wants to not let love in so that it’s free of potential loss. It wants a break from feeling anything at all. It wants someone to hold her and rock her and tell her she's okay, she's okay, she's okay.