Self Soothing

There are some places that not everyone can follow you. And there are some situations where nothing can really be said. You have to just man up and handle it all by yourself – mostly because… you don’t really know how to articulate it for someone else to understand and sympathize and offer any comfort.

Mother’s day and Father’s day are always going to be a sore spot for me. But not because I am angry about my mom and dad passing. That’s an inevitability that comes with living life. I couldn’t ever expect them to live for ever. But there’s a whirlwind of other things that swoop down over my mind when I think about them being gone. I think about the fact that I was right there when they both died. I had to watch them both fade away… I had to watch the strange things a human body does when it’s at that point. The twitching. The involuntary motion. The collapse of muscle usage. Rather than have a great image of them vibrant and living as my last mental picture. It’s terribly haunting.

Then I torture myself with the things I couldn’t perceivably control. My dad not getting to see me walk down the aisle. My children being raised without maternal grandparents and never knowing the joy of a grandpa at all… And of course there’s the lashings of “I could have done more… I could have acted quicker… I could have fought harder for their care” that come in every now and again to add the extra sting to my little self pity party.

And in an attempt to try to escape these trappings… to air out what’s on your mind and return to some semblance of normalcy – you turn to your friends… and they try to understand if they can. But you can’t get the words out effectively. Or at least… I can’t. And I’m back to square one. Not their fault. But you can only expect so much salvation. Some of it is all up to you.

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