It's a curious thing, the death of a loved one.
We all know that our time in this world is limited,
and that eventually all of us will end up
underneath some sheet, never to wake up.
And yet it is always a surprise when it happens to someone we know.
It is like walking up the stairs to your bedroom in the dark,
and thinking there is one more stair than there is.
Your foot falls down, through the air,
And there is a sickly moment of dark surprise as you try and readjust
the way you thought of things.
Dear Shane . . .
It's been six years. 2,190 days. Yet sometimes the pain is still so surreal that I feel like you still have a grip on my heart. I'm not sure if I'll ever forgive you for taking the easy way out. Because as much as you may think you got away, you sure as hell didn't. You changed my life and left me to deal with your problems. Yes, I blamed myself for your death. For years. Many years. But I write you six years later, to tell you I will no longer carry this burden upon my shoulders. I'm not upset with you, and I may not understand you and your actions, but it is my responsibility to let you know that I am letting go of something that has changed who I am, how I act towards people, my personality, my personal intimate boundaries, and overall, what has made me who I am today. I know you are still with me in spirit. I feel your presence sometimes, like a cold chill that resonates your whole body in a split second. I still hear your voice sometimes like a whistle in the wind on a quiet fall day. But I've found something. Something you couldn't give me while you were alive. It's a true love that promises to be by my side for as long as we live. And although it was you who taught me how to love, it is also you who taught me how to deal with a broken heart. This letter is for you. You should know I've changed. You should know you have changed my thought process on life, death and grief. And you should know... although I am finally moving on, I'll still remember you.
I don't know if you heard me when I talked to you. Multiple times a year I'd find an empty field or open lawn in a park, lay down, look up at the stars and talk to you. I would spend many nights talking to the sky, weeping, sometimes breathing uncontrollably asking you to just explain yourself. When I doubted everything in my life, everything I believed in, it was you who I turned to. I told you all my secrets, all my desires, all my reservations, all my frustrations. Take it as you will, but it's the only thing I could do when you left me with nothing.
You've taught me a lot. You've changed me a lot. Ever since you left, I've never loved the same. I started to put everyone first. You've taught me the importance of taking care of others. I often think if I didn't take care of you, perhaps you'd still be alive and I could have saved your life. It's a train of thought that still creeps on my mind like an annoying tick that doesn't seem to go away. A painful reminder, of what could have been. Ever since, I've made it my mission to ensure others welfare before mine. I can take care of myself, but it was a matter of keeping those who I care about close to me and never letting them think I don't care. You taught me love is more than just me and someone else. Love is more. Love is a sacrifice. Love is thinking about others before you think about yourself. Love is selfless. But you also showed me love is selfish.
I thank you for providing guidance long after you've left. But, I've taken this too far. When does it become self-harmful to care for others so much. Perhaps when you start to lose focus on the way you used to be, when you were happy. Genuinely happy. Sometimes I get so wrapped up in trying to be so perfect and make things so great for other people that I get so frustrated at myself for not providing the best. The best romantic evening. The best surprise. The best school work. The best performance at work.
That leads me to another lesson...You've taught me to be the best I can be, and nothing less. It's one thing I can never forget that you wrote to me. In that small letter you left in your pale, cold hands, you told me never settle for less than what I deserve and what I can do. And I haven't. I put everything forward that I can, for the most part. Because of you, I made changes in my life. I wasn't happy with life in Michigan, and you knew that, so I asked you. And one night I felt you answer. It is because of you that I'm here, in Pittsburgh, with a life I couldn't have ever dreamed of.
Yet, being the best I can be has also led me to hating you. Not because of what you did, but because being the best I can be, means letting you down when I'm not. When things aren't perfect, I'm led to blame things on you. I can't tell other people that. But that's how I feel. I try my damn best to do everything right and be the best at what I do. And instead of being a normal person and accepting faults and flaws sometimes, I get enraged inside. Because this isn't just a personal failure, it's showing you I'm not good enough. I know it is a little confusing and may not make sense. And truthfully, I don't think about it this way every time I don't succeed at something. It's a natural instinct for me to kick myself so hard for me to feel some internal pain when I don't do something perfect, whether for me or someone else. You've taught me of the taunting consequences that can happen when I don't try my best and put everything I have into something I care about. I sure as hell put you first in my life, but I didn't put everything I had into caring about you. And that's my fault. But it's not my fault you are dead. So, instead of slowly killing my own dignity or taking frustration out on other people, I'm going to accept that even when I try to succeed at something and it doesn't turn out the way I had hoped, it's not always my fault.
It's weird how it happens. The grief over you has really gave me opportunities to explore things I may never have had to do. See, grief makes us see things in a different light. It made me want things I'd never thought about. It derailed all my plans. It made me do and feel things I never thought was possible, especially at an adolescent life stage. It changed me. People think grief is a choice--but it really isn't. It's something that's thrust on us. There is no way we can possibly choose to feel things we never imagined possible. Think about skydiving. If you've never gone, you have no idea how it feels to jump out of plane and fall through the sky at 200 mph. You can't imagine the feeling. But once you go, it's a feeling you get that you can't explain and never thought you could feel. It's so much more than your heart dropping to your stomach. No matter how hard you try, there's no way you can change that feeling. It's in the moment, and it's a simple cause and affect relationship. It's a feeling that strikes your entire body.
I thought grief was a quiet, melancholy, a sweet nostalgia, a pervasive sadness. But, for me, grief was not exactly those things when you died. It is hard to describe what it actually feels like and what someone goes through. As a social worker, I get asked a lot if I have gone through something someone is going through, to know how it really feels what they are going through. Often, my response was "A doctor doesn't need to have a heart attack in order to treat one." It wasn't really a true heart-felt answer, it was more or less an answer to avoid telling others of my feelings of my experience. It's not professional to bring your own feelings into therapy. But the fact is, it helps to feel the pain, the angst, heart-stabbing, body-numbing, emptiness others feel to try and console them. I think a good therapist who counsels someone in grief should have gone through a loss like they have to try and help someone. God knows there are enough of us out there who legitimately know grief. And now...I am one of them. This is the real reason I do not want to get into clinical psychotherapy social work. I tell people it's just not for me, or I don't like it. And I'd rather focus on organizational social work. It's not all truthful. I just know that if I can't even handle my own grief right, there's no way in hell I'll be able to help other people. Textbooks don't teach you that stuff.
You taught me love comes with grief. It's inevitable. Before people fall in love, they haven't a clue of its true power, and then it washes over them, like a tsunami towering over you. You are so small, and as this tsunami wave comes crashing over you, you stare it, numb, heart out of your chest, paralyzed. And then it washes over you in a life-changing moment. Before you fall into grief, you haven't a clue of its true power as well. But it too, washes over you in a life-changing moment, and all but drowns you. Even though I've experienced so much of what grief does to a person, I still can't believe its power. It's everlasting power that can drench you. The way grief reflects falling in love as in a very dark mirror, there has to be a hormonal component. I know stress releases hormones, as does shock. Adrenaline courses through your body, and there are changes in brain chemistry, that produces hormones. Your immune system goes on hold, your body processes it's loss. Grief is felt by your whole body, just as love is. Only people who are capable of loving strongly can also suffer great sorrow. But this same necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heals them.
Despite the bitterness I posses in this blog to you Shane, you were my lover and you have taught me to share my heart with so many people. You also taught me to appreciate the small things in life.
Grief, such as the one you provided to me, can destroy someone...it can also focus someone. I could have decided this relationship was all for nothing because you ended it in your own death, and left me alone. However, somehow I've realized that every moment of it had more meaning than I dared to recognize at the time, so much meaning it scared me, so I just lived, and took for granted the love and laughter of each day. And you know what, it didn't allow myself to consider the sacredness of it. But when it was finally over, and I was alone, I began to see that it wasn't just a movie and a dinner together, not just a day of being lazy together, not just watching sunsets together, not just washing dishes, or worrying over the high electric bill. It was everything. It was the why of life, every event and precious moment of it. The ache is always there, but one day not the emptiness, because to nurture the emptiness, to take solace in it, is to disrespect the gift of life. And that is why I've decided to move on from you, what we had, and the grief. I've found someone to fill my happiness beyond the capacity imaginable in my being.
Sometimes touching the ring you gave me enhances the feeling that you are not here. It's the only physical thing I have left from you. It represents the mental pictures, the good times, the fights, the phone calls, but also the drugs, the alcohol, the neglect, the self-harm. I can't wear it anymore. The ring feels too heavy on my finger and I want you to have it back. When I take it off, it feels like I'm abandoning you, and I feel guilty. But it's not right and it's not helping. I see, hear and feel you crying, hurting, holding your chest when I have it off. But it's about time you feel some pain, if it's a fraction of what I've felt for the last several years.
Your absence has transcended well in my life as a pure lost in love and possibility. But I can no longer keep wondering if we would have been together, or what would have happened. But you still come to a shock randomly. At times when I think about how long it has been, it feels like a blow to the chest, and almost restricts my breathing. Then I think...but you are dead. I am alive. Very alive. And you can not console me, you can not grieve with me, you can not make me feel better. So I move on.
I don't know if you felt the pain I felt when you left. It's a strange concept to know you were there with me in spirit, but unknown if you felt the feelings I felt. Looking at your burial was the hardest thing I've had to do. The only thing you can think of is wondering how to do things alone that you did together. How am I to watch a sunset with nobody beside me, with no hand to hold. I thought of the tears sliding down my cheeks as memories leaving our relationship. Sleepless nights, alcohol filled days, and mornings of sitting on the edge of bridges all brought me to realize grief can be hell.
Six years pass where I've felt guilty. I've held on to a feeling of unfinished business. As if I should have properly ended our love. But that was your fault, not mine. And I refuse to take blame for it. But just as quickly, I feel like an awful person feeling angry towards you, when you are not here to defend yourself.
Shane, they tell me grief is a cut that never completely heals. You can still see, all the time. Sometimes, it's a reminder of the past and the lost. But most days it doesn't bother me. Some days it feels like the cut is killing me, like horrible infectious disease that east away at your tissues. Every year on this day I feel like taking a knife to that cut and just ending that damn wound that you created, thinking you took the easy way, why the hell can't I. But then I think about the tears cascading down the faces of loved ones I know, and know I could never put that upon them just as you did. It hurts too much. If they are right, if grief is a cut that will never heal, I'm willing to leave this cut, sometimes visible, and move on with my life than trying to tend to it. It's been six years, it's had plenty of time to heal on its own. If not by then, it never will.
No longer will I be blind from what's holding me back. No longer will I carry an unnecessary weight pushing me down. No longer will I blame myself for what could have been. No longer will I take moments for granted and think nothing could happen. And no longer will I wait for your approval to be happy again.
You can not die of grief, though it feels as if you can. A heart does not actually break, though sometimes your chest aches as if it is breaking. Grief dims with time. It is the way of things. There comes a day when you smile again, and you feel like a traitor. How dare I feel happy. How dare I be glad in a world where my lover is no more. And then you cry fresh tears, because you do not miss him as much as you once did, and giving up your grief is another kind of death.
