Ripples and waves

I've meant to get on here several times in the last few weeks--to post pictures from Anna's first day of first grade or else her seventh birthday, if nothing else--but it didn't happen. I don't know if it's because I've been busy or if the jumble in my head was too, well, jumbled to write about, but it hadn't come out. But it certainly could or should have….

A friend asked me earlier this week--a widowed friend who's six days "older" on this crap-ass journey--how year six has been. And truth be told, it's been rather crummy so far.

The actual sixth death anniversary in July hit me a little harder than most have the past few years, but it's been the ripples after it that have been longer lasting, harder in their own way.

Like when I had to pick out my appropriate ribbon for my lanyard at Camp Widow, designating how long I'd been widowed. They have different colors with different time lengths on them--0-6 months, 6-12 months, 1 year, 2 years, etc.--and I remember being sort of oddly proud (I suppose) of selecting the 5 years badge last year. It felt like an accomplishment of sorts, like I'd survived long enough to fully earn it.

But this year? I was surprised when I felt a thump in the bottom of my stomach as I had to pick up the 6-10 years version.

Six to ten years?? That's what I'm lumped into now??

The years and length of time have really been getting to me lately, been setting me off. Perhaps some of it is because of Anna's birthday and the usual triggers from it, I suppose. She turned seven just over a week ago.

Seven.

It feels like a strangely long time. A disturbingly long time, actually. And somehow that age, that milestone of seven years, has been driving our loss, her loss of a father she can't remember--whom she'd know and have memories of if he'd died now, instead of when she was 10 months old--home to me even more. Again.

Yea.

(And yes, that was definitely sarcasm.)

Going back to work has been triggering the time lapse too, in pulsating neon numbers. I started my new job three weeks ago (which has been going fine, by the way), and between introducing myself in a staff meeting (all of it via teleconference) and talking on the phone with the woman I'm covering for over the next nine months, the length of time I've been home with Anna has really hit me…and hit me hard. I haven't seen this woman in ten years and it's been over eleven years since I really spent any time with her--she was on staff with me my last year in college, when I was editor of the school's annual literary arts magazine; I basically got my job now through Facebook, after she saw some of my status updates that I was going back to work and looking for jobs--and somehow it dawned on me that I've basically been home with Anna for seven fucking years. Yes, I technically worked when she was a baby, but really, it was only for six months. I went back to work in January of 2005, when she was 4 months old, and I stopped working in July when Charley died--and in the larger scheme of her life, 6 months doesn't really count for much.

But regardless of splitting hairs--has it been six years or seven that I've been home with her?--it's really hit me how much of my life has passed in the last six or seven years, and it's been hard. I never intended to stay home with her for six (seven?) years, never intended to still be sad and single and childless (any extra children, at least) and so terribly isolated after six years. I think it's one excruciating part of being widowed so damned young and after only a year and a half of marriage, and choosing to stay home with Anna: it feels like my life has stopped, that it ended and I've lived in a suspended, forgotten state for a depressingly long time. Where did my life go?

Charley and I weren't married long enough to have a realistic picture of how our relationship would have been by now; he wasn't alive long enough for me to know how he'd realistically have coped with parenting; with Anna's crazy-making idiosyncrasies; with money worries, unemployment, or the disappointments in life. That glowing, perfect honeymoon period that we had doesn't do me much good now.

I don't really know what to do, either, while watching the years roll ever higher in our friends' marriages, particularly the ones who got married the same year we did. Charley and I should have been married seven, almost eight, years now; would likely have had at least one more child. And instead I have a weird mishmash of other numbers…dead six years…home for seven (six?) years…married only a year and a half….

Fortunately I had a bit of an epiphany the week before Labor Day, during that last week of August. Anna was at Charley's parents' house for the week, for her annual week at Grandma Judy's. As I drove her to Eugene--a midway point two hours from each of us--to meet Charley's parents and hand her off to them, the deja vu hit me. It had been three years since the last time we did the kid-swap in Eugene, at that same Costco parking lot, and back in 2008 it was only two weeks or so after Papa, Judy's dad, had had the minor surgery that would end up killing him a year later. In 2009, Anna's week at Grandma Judy's was marked by the short-lived, ill-fated dog we had for only one week and came on the heels of a painful summer, between the death of our dog Chase, Papa's death, and all the stress from my job back then. (We didn't do the annual week last year because Judy came with us for our two-week trip to California and Disneyland.) And until I dropped Anna off with Charley's parents and drove home, I forgot that I have a very strong tendency to fall apart during that week when she's gone. I do fine when she's at my parents' house or when I leave her to go somewhere (like Camp Widow or small vacations)…but I don't deal well with it when I'm home for a week and she's not.

So I flipped out a little bit the first half of the week while she was gone. Nothing horrible, but I was aware of the murkiness of my reaction; mercifully, though, the second half of the week was better. But as I drove to a friend's house for cocktail "hour" (which turned into three hours) the night before I would go pick Anna up, I finally had an "a-ha!" moment where I really connected a second thing: that periods of stress will make the grief worse again.

Right.

With it hitting September and Anna's birthday again, I had to face an uncomfortable milestone of sorts: it's been six months since I started falling apart this spring, since the stress and worry about money, a job, my life, started in earnest.

Six months. That's a long time to have to live with with fear, to live in hunkered-down survival mode again.

And lo and behold, after six months of worry and stress and isolation, the grief is back again, more than it has been in a while.

Somehow I'd forgotten that this happens. I first learned this lesson two years ago and I've seen it in my widowed friends too (so I know it's not just me)…but I didn't necessarily connect the two things until driving to my friend's house.

Remembering helped, I suppose. It didn't make it go away or get noticeably better, but at least I knew why I was thinking and reacting the way I did (the way I am?).

But it still doesn't feel good to have these old grief radars and triggers back in the forefront again. It's too easy to fall into a trap of unhelpful thinking patterns. Why am I doing all this again? Why is this coming back up again? I thought I'd worked past all of this a while ago!

Trying to explain it to people who haven't experienced anything similar is too exhausting, too depressing, so I don't even try. Besides, that crap is in my head way too much of the time when I'm at home; the last thing I want to do when I'm with friends or family is talk about it. I want a break from it, damnitall! (And it's not like anyone really asks, anyway, with a few, rare exceptions.) Yet it's still there, and it still makes me feel crazy, isolated, and broken in so many ways.

And while full-day school for Anna is absolutely fabulous and the job is going fine and we're adjusting to the new schedule okay, there's still that lingering, too familiar undertow too. I've wondered so many times lately if I'm actually officially, clinically depressed after the last two years (the last six years?), or if perhaps it's been anxiety--of the clinical, diagnosed sort--these past six months.

Translation? I wonder if it's past time to suck it up, admit I can't/won't/don't want to continue living like this, and go see a damned doctor about a prescription for something. An antidepressant, something to help me fall asleep like a normal person at night, antianxiety meds…something…anything. Because while I intellectually know that grief and stress and life will periodically flare up over the years--because that's what life is, in so many ways: the difficulties mixed in with the sweet and wonderful times--they sure are awful to live with for six months…or six years. And I'm not sure I have the patience, faith, or masochism to just "wait and see" how the next few weeks and months go and hope they get better on their own.

I really would like my damned life back at some point, please. Not my old life--I know I can't have it again, curse it all--but my life…and not some suspended, half-version of it.

Or maybe it's just really that I'd like to be happy again, to be satisfied and content; that I'm tired of being sad and depressed for so long now.

Sigh.

Do they sell that pill in pharmacies??