Remember that movie?  With Robin Williams.  Man, that movie kicked my emotional ass.  It came out within a year or so of my Jerry’s passing.  My Soulmale; my husband.  Well, anyway.  Last night and early this morning was a time like that.

I couldn’t sleep, but I was emotionally fine.  Bloghopping and playing computer games while watching Gorilla’s in the Mist (another great movie!).  Before I knew it, it was 3 AM and I knew if I didn’t get a lil sleep I’d be fucked today.  So, wide awake, I whined a lil as I shut down my Mac, turned the light off and tried to get comfy for sleep.

Bam!

It was like a light switch turned on in my head!  All of a sudden it was as if every one of the recent horrible moments of my life began playing like a video loop in my head.  I saw myself at the Integratron the moment my daughter called and told me our Lil Pharoah had stopped breathing… felt myself driving 120 miles an hour over a winding desert highway, with my mouth so dry I felt like I was choking on dust and a knot in my stomach that felt like ten tons of radioactive waste.

Flash forward to my baby… my precious daughter on her knees retching and dry heaving and crying and screaming “Noooo…. I want my son back.  Give him back to me”, while we knelt beside her, her husband and I stroking her hair and sobbing.

To his tiny cremains…

To my daughter’s beautiful face that now wears the shadow of this loss.

Fuck!  I was like, what the fuck is going on?  Where did this come from?  I struggled with my mind and heart, tried to divert myself with meditation, with to-do lists for today, with what I would make for dinner, the next blog post I would write…

It was no good.  My head just kept playing those awful tapes, along with a couple more that are too awful to even write.  Playing them over and over and over.

This used to happen to me after Jerry died, too.  But somehow last night, and my daughter’s pain, made it so much worse.

The last time I looked at the clock it was about 4:30, so I finally went to sleep.  I awakened this morning around 9AM, with echoes of the nights visions, but they were distant and foggy; much more like the memories of those awful days that I have been accustomed to living with.

At 10AM my daughter called me on her break.  “Mom, me n A. had a hella night!” she said. “We went to bed early but we tossed and turned, both of us, all night.  When we woke up this morning we both felt like we hadn’t slept at all- like we’d had bad dreams all night but couldn’t remember them”.

I’m so fucking grateful that they couldn’t remember them.

When my husband, Jerry, my “soulmale” and love of my life (one of 2… I can’t seem to choose between- and why should I? I have decided that when one dies, I am allowed 2 “Loves of My Life), died in 1998 I grieved.

Of course this loss is so different. Nonetheless the mind continues to seek familiarity. (An effort, perhaps to find some experiential hint on how to proceed).

Well, I could write a book on my grief, my “breakdown” 14 months later, my process and my eventual and ultimate healing, but that’s not the point that is vexing me today. My thoughts keep circling back to what feels like an important part of my current struggle in grieving this loss, the loss of not only my beautiful grandson, Bishop; but the loss of my daughter’s (and perhaps somehow my own??) innocence and heart.

What has occurred to me over and over of late is that there seems to be no place for these losses within my personal identity that fits.

This is so difficult to articulate.

Somehow, over time after my Jerry died, “widow” became not a title or mere description, but a part of my identity.

I was a widow.

It seemed somehow to state clearly who I was and there was some odd comfort and implied strength in that for me. It became part of my identity that I grew to accept and ultimately embrace. I don’t know; perhaps it was all tied up with getting my business off the ground at the time- survival. Perhaps the designation between “widow” and “single woman” was important. I don’t know exactly why it was so; it simply was.

And in some way I think that embracing that as part of who I was at the time, and for the next many ensuing years, was part of my healing process. Somehow it gave me a very clear context within which to place the huge event in my life that was the loss of that beautiful man who meant so much to me. And strange as it may seem, somehow it was a positive thing.

Oh, I’m fumbling and bumbling to express this.

The thing is, there is no context within which to place the loss of my grandbaby and the grief for my daughter. I’m feeling/thinking (one or the other or both- these processes are inextricably enmeshed) that there is simply nothing in these losses to embrace in a positive and affirming way for my identity.

Oh, I’m sure people will mouth (or write) inanities the likes of “you’re so strong, you’ve been through so much, that’s something to embrace”, but that’s not how it feels, and that’s not enough.

Before our Bishop died, I had become pretty disillusioned with the world, politics, human beings in general after all my political activism and blogging and outrage. The stoning of that man and woman somehow seemed to be the final straw for me. It broke my heart and rather than inspire cynicism in me it invoked a sort of despair. I felt defeated. I took a hiatus from blogging to try to find a place in me from which to care, without despairing.

Bear with me.

Our Bishop’s senseless and inexplicable death (SIDS is in no way an explanation) has evoked a hopelessness and despair in me that I can’t seem to kick. It has brought home to me, on a personal level, the chaos and senselessness of a world and existence in which people are stoned to death, murdered for a few dollars, bombed at the whim of one government, starved and gassed at the whim of another, and where babies die for no apparent reason.

An existence in which it had already grown so difficult for me to see “God” (as a very generic term). Perhaps the better term here would simply be “meaning”.

“Existentialist”, “Athiest”- these are not terms that I’m willing to embrace as my identity. “Defeated”, “despairing” are not either.

I can’t seem to find a way to integrate this loss, this experience, these feelings, this grief into my personal identity.

I think that’s a problem.

Chaos reigns and I despair, lost in the void. I need to find my heart, but it seems to be MIA.

*4:03 PM editorial comment:
Writing this and then reading it here in black and white I note that it both falls far short of articulating my feelings and expresses them perfectly. Yet one more paradox of my existence. I should also note that it’s exceedingly difficult to face these feelings this way; outwardly, instead of continuing to be wantonly assaulted with them inwardly (privately). And although this; writing/blogging, is one of several courses of action I’ve decided upon in hope of some movement from this place, it feels pointless. Nonetheless I shall continue.

… and none perhaps to come for some time. Not that knowing will change anything; I realize this.

After the Coroner’s office told my daughter that our Bishop wouldn’t be released for up to 2 weeks, and we elected to just wait… not to call and be frustrated and angry with the official processes, rather to put our faith and trust in the hope of a system that cares why babies die…

They called my daughter this morning to inquire as to why we hadn’t made arrangements, as he’d been released for some time. Fucking idiots. Today they are saying he was released on the very same day they told us it would be up to 2 weeks. They say we misunderstood, that they meant for results, yet in the same breath we are told that results will take up to two months.

I hope that the bumbling fools on the phones are not representative of the proficiency levels of the investigator- medical examiner-whatever.

We’ll need to go down to Riverside now; to the Neptune Society, who will have the care of his body for cremation.

I went to a meeting last night. An intimate little “Rainbow” (Gay), AA meeting held at a home a few blocks from me. I was asked to lead the meeting, which was difficult under the circumstances. Still, I was raised up in an AA that suggests that one “Never turn down an AA request”, and if I’ve learned anything in 19- almost 20 years of sobriety, it’s that I must give it away to keep it. I acquiesced and did my best to tell “how it was, what happened” but I kinda lost it when I came to the “how it is today” part.

As I shared my story, and heard myself speaking of the Gods, (Higher Power) and reflecting on the blessings that I have had in my life, my willingness to embrace Deity and that there is a greater meaning, I found myself carrying on an inner dialogue; a critique of my thoughts and beliefs that made me realize and better understand why there are so many atheists and existentialists who simply cannot give any credence to the possibility of a Higher Power of any sort.

After all, what is my tiny loss here but a single tear in a flood; no- an ocean of despair?

Countless pointless deaths and myriad sufferings which serve no purpose- which can be assigned no “greater good”. No pious self comforting delusions here of “everything happens for a reason”, or ignorant Christian blatherings of “the lord works in mysterious ways”.

There is no comfort for this- this pointless, random event.

So how do I fit this into my “faith”, my “belief systems”? The same way, I suppose, that I fit all the other random and insane cruelty, and tragedy and horror into it.

The Random. Chaos. Nature. She’s cruel, Nature is (like a cat with a mouse). And random (like the “Big Bang”). And pointless (like rainbows). And there is ebb and flow and change; order and chaos. And somehow it’s magickal and beautiful despite it all.

My AA sponsor says “We’re not humans having a spiritual experience, we’re spirits having a human experience.”

So with that awkward segue I’m back to the AA meeting, and the “how it is now” part.

“How it is now”, I said, “is fucked beyond belief. I thought I learned about powerlessness when I got clean and sober. It was slow going for a control freak like me, but I learned. Or I thought I did. When my daughter was raped; another lesson in powerlessness. When she attempted suicide; yet another. Still; there were things I could do to help her. Counseling, therapy, psych meds. Then at 10 years sober I lost my Jerry. My husband, love, partner, friend- my “soulmale”, and I realized yet again that my previous understanding of “powerlessness” was bullshit. I thought that his death taught me the truth of being powerless…”

*(He was too young- only 45; my sweet man. Still, he’d been sober and we’d been together nearly 10 years, had the opportunity to love and be loved- to be a father to my Fawn- we’d healed each others hearts and I was grateful for the blessings I had. When the Coroner told me that he had a congenital form of arteriosclerotic heart disease and it was nothing short of a miracle that he lived to be 45- that men like my husband die often in their 20′s- I managed to find some solace in the thought that our love and what we were to each other was indeed somehow “meant to be”.)

“… but this; this loss, that precious baby- my daughter’s loss- now this is powerlessness.” I went on, sobbing and blubbering to say that even though I do have room in my philosophy for “the random”, I have no will to turn to any sort of Gods for solace or help right now. I’m not pissed, exactly, more that I don’t want anything to do with anything that would allow this sort of random devastation to touch my family. If there are energies available to those who turn to them, for today I eschew their so-called “help”. I eschew their hollow “comfort”. And today, I am grateful that sobriety, for me, has become a habit. A habit that is so firmly established in my life that not even a passing thought enters of using or drinking anything that might even for a moment soften or even dull this choking, crushing pain.

So I cried there, in my tiny meeting with love and compassion and acceptance and empathy surrounding me, while I shared my heart. And somehow, as we alcoholics are blessed to do in our fellowship, these lovely people heard me when I said,

“I was told in my early recovery that the time would come when there would be nothing standing between me and a drink or drug but my Higher Power. I want to tell you all that that may be true, but if you stay sober long enough there will also come a time when no Higher Power will do it for you, and that’s the time that sobriety better be second nature; a habit, something you do without thinking.”

And that’s where I am today. Lost, angry at this fucked up acceptance that seems to be ingrained in my very soul, grieving and powerless; but sober.

“To be wounded by your own understanding of Love
and to bleed willingly and joyfully”
-Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet