Who Me, Denial? Oh Please, And HEY I have the BEST joke to tell you!

... yikes. I realized in a whole enormous woosh of feelings tonight that while i have talked and thought a lot about how much my Dad is in denial about things (my asthma, mold in the house), i have been too. And "I have had to", which is why denial was built into us, so we go from one stage of loss to the other and not get slammed by all of it at once.

 And while i hope to keep this blog light-hearted, because there really is enough to be sad about in the world, i also respect real-ness, & hope to be that as well. Authentic.  My favorite people, the people who have had the most POSITIVE influence in my life are not people who have their act completely together. (Or who i think has their act together. :))  I  had a conversation with a friend recently about some private, "heart things" and this person had to sort of pull me back  more than once when i would go for the joke - which i did over & over -  instead of talking about this thing i have to be vague about here (another story for another day, possibly). Joking and laughing is wonderful, but so is a really good, honest, cards-on-the-table talk with a person i love & respect. 

My friend was not this fancy. And yes that was silly, but that is who i am. I'm a  li'l silly. 


So i need to talk a bit about loss & how we - i - handle it, and maybe someone who reads this some day will relate and not feel so terribly alone. I am feeling so terribly alone right now and it is really eating away at me. I don't want that for anyone else. 

Backing up a bit -  so what happened to make me suddenly so self-aware that i too hail from Denialville?  What happened tonight to make me aware that I had not yet really grieved the loss of my home was that I saw it. I was at Google Maps, looking for a link a friend had sent and realized it was near my (This is so hard, do i just soldier through?) - it was close to where i used to live. Then i did something that turned out to not be very smart - i zoomed in. And that function of Google Maps that i usually find so novel and fun slapped me in the face. I could see my roof. My next-door neighbor's tree, the one that hung over my patio and made it impossible to keep clean. I sat here on this bed in this house that is not mine and put my hand over my mouth as i cried. Then i said, out loud, through my tears, "That is my patio! That is where (all of the cats, if i write their names right now it will be too much for me) they lived! The ones i had to leave behind!! Dammit, i miss them and i worry for them!! And this was not fair!!" My Mom always said it was so interesting that i seemed to have "come out of the womb loving cats". And i do. I have a lot of cool cat stories and i'll share them later. But right now i just need a little Memorial or something. Because when your home is gone, when it stops being a part of your life, it in a sense, dies. And there are no rules for how to grieve any loss but the loss of humans. Not that i know of. 

So i think i will figure out what those might be, and i'll share them if & when i do.  I resisted loving my house for a long, long time and the ugly irony - and i am so sorry Mom, if you are reading this, but it's just true - i had just finally felt like that place was mine maybe days before she told me the bad news. And i know it breaks my Mom's heart too, I know. But this is my loss, and I need to deal with it. I'll let you guys know what i find as i think about this facet of how life has changed and is changing, OK? But please know that you are absolutely allowed to cry if you lose something you put your heart into.  If you have lost a dream, even a secret one, if you lost ... your thick hair or your ability to run as fast as you used to be able to or... whatever it was.  Grieve it, and then walk on, because (I will resist the very powerful urge to hit you with a platitude here) life is full of change. This we know for sure. 

:)

al


PS - reading this again? That helped so much. I felt the vise that held my heart so tightly let loose a bit. I enjoyed remembering. I'm not "all fixed" now, but i am better. Writing is good stuff.