Advisors

Around the time June Jhumpa was adopted

When I got deeply depressed in graduate school, my dissertation advisor told me to pull myself up by my bootstraps and get out of my funk.

I didn't have the ability to tell her, "Mental illness doesn't work that way."

I occasionally search google to see if she's dead yet. She isn't. But others are. Like the one who sang to us, "You always hurt the one you love," as an introduction to psychological criticism.  If Will were here he'd laugh with me about the mustard-colored suit Sillars wore when he sang. And then the one who said he was my friend and then gaslit me is also alive. Sometimes I wish we were still friends but then I remember he's a dick.

The high school teachers I loved are all dead, of course - Mr. Barrans, Mr. Ridgely, Mr. Glasner, Mr. Negendank. I think about high school because that was the last time before Will died that I was alone like this - when I was living with family. But then I thought I had one friend who loved me as I was. But that friendship is gone as well, as least in its classic form, though it died long before I was ready to pronounce it.

Last week I was a bit of an advisor as I spoke with A. whose wife has dementia. A. told me that when she had heard the story of my putting my hand through a glass door because of mindless rage she'd thought it was extreme but now she has realized that it wasn't extreme and I told her "I'm sorry you have that understanding now."

Terri arranged our first meeting of Grieving Souls group at church. Originally it was supposed to be widows and widowers but that wasn't "diverse" enough, according to the church people who have a say in such things. Frankly, I feel angry that I need to share a group with people who have lost their pets but whatever. Every grief is a grief, huh? We're all equal. Like the women whose butts were grabbed and those of us who were gang raped.  All equally suffering harassment. I'm so glad that Terri has the determination and facility to reach out. I didn't and don't. And it's great that I now have someone to take me to and from my next colonoscopy. That's one of the purposes of the group, to give people who don't have other family or friends' support. And it's good that I will be able to provide support for others.

I have gratitude every day for what I have. I am financially secure and what's more important than that? 

At the same time I am sad because I've lost the one person who loved me as I am.  But that's okay. At least I got that experience and many people do not.

Every day, lately, I see in my head the image of him in his diaper, weighing 112 lbs, walking into our bedroom after escaping the hospital bed in the living room, with a big, childish smile on his face after surfing the wall down the hall.  That happened just as I was arranging with College Hunks Hauling Junk to take our bed away. He would be dead within six days.  Or I see his dead face in the reed coffin in the graveyard when I had to touch it one last time. He was so cold and hardened from the embalming fluid.

At least when he was alive, even if he didn't know me, I could hold him.  At least when he was in his coffin I could still touch him and feel that so-well-known profile.

I miss him so much every day. And he's dead every day. Every fucking day when I wake up he's still dead. Sometimes when I hear noises in the other room I call his name. I pray to feel his spirit touch the bed again. But someday I won't wake up and our spirits will be together again. I live in this hope.

And anyway, I deserve all this suffering because I wasn't "there" for some other people when they were grieving. This is just karma doing its thing. As the late Malcolm Sillars once (or twice or a million times) said, "Work is good. Suffering is better."

So I'm fine.