Tag Archives: death

Grief

18 Nov

Grief is an odd thing, we will all at some point experience it and yet, no two people will go through it the same way.

Some crush it down refusing to acknowledge it is there. Others become so wrapped up in it they never function the same way again. Most I think muddle through, alternating between days where they can fake things well enough to appear to be ok and other days they drown under the waves of emotion that bombard them, until they find a new normal. A slightly calmer ebb and flow of grief, one they can handle while still functioning in society. An odd tear at a random moment, a brief hitch of breath when a stab of pain finds their heart, but those come farther and farther apart until you can almost pretend the pain was never there. It isn’t under the newly formed scar, it isn’t something you’ve learned to live with, you just pretend it’s gone, never was, and that all is fine again.

Grief isn’t a bump we trip over while going through life, it’s a hole we fall into and have to crawl our way out of. Grief is a tsunami crashing over us that if we don’t hold our breath well enough, and swim strongly enough, we’ll never escape.

Grief comes to us because we have experienced a loss so painful we can’t brush it off, can’t look the other way, can’t eat a bit of ice cream and move on. It comes to us when our heart breaks, when our soul feels ripped in two, when the world no longer makes sense and we are left scrambling to find our footing.

Maybe at first you don’t try to find your footing maybe you let yourself stay afloat, unmoored, not tethered to anything, because the pain is so overwhelming you don’t even know how to reach out to someone so they can help anchor you.

When your feet finally find the ground again the pain doesn’t go away, it intensifies because now you’re forced to feel it all. There is no buffer, no cloudy mind to help hide the truth of what has happened. Now it’s just you and the pain facing off.

Does the pain win? Do you win? Can there be a winner or just a vague truce made between the two?

Eventually, if you live long enough and if you’ve let yourself become close enough to others that you feel love, you will feel grief. There’s a quote, something about the more you hurt the stronger you loved. I don’t know if that sentiment is right, but I do know that right now my heart is destroyed, I am broken, the pain of loss has beat me and I don’t care if I ever come back from it because I don’t want a world where this person who is vital for my happiness isn’t here. But that isn’t how life works. We lose people, it’s inevitable, and the world keeps going on about its business while those like me are left stumbling, off rhythm from everyone else, because they are no longer whole and don’t care enough to try to fake being ok.

Grief is an equalizer, a painful one. By choosing to love we voluntarily sign ourselves up to one day feel this way. A poor bargain is it not? Is the love once felt worth the pain that takes it’s place?

The person I lost, the reason I am drowning right now, I wouldn’t be the person I am today if I hadn’t had them in my life. Their impact on who I became was huge, and the memories I have of them so dear to me I will fight with everything I have to preserve them. I cling to one of their cardigans, I ordered their favourite meal at a restaurant, I’m eating their ice cream, all to try to bring them back to me, to feel them close just for one more second. It’s a stupid game I play, one that will only hurt me in the end because they aren’t coming back and trying to cling to them just makes the pain last longer, cut deeper, overwhelm me even more.

The value I place on every photograph of them, every item they once used or touched, is so high I would make rash decisions and poor choices to keep all these items just as they are. I can’t make their entire house a shrine, and I shouldn’t try, but every time something changes I hurt a bit more because that is a change they won’t see, an update they won’t know about. It is proof life is going on without them and right now, with the pain so strong, I don’t understand how that is possible.

He is dead, and I am lost, but I guess the pain is the price of such a strong love and since I don’t want to know what a life without that love would have been like, who I would have been without it, grief is the price I must pay.

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A Little Decomp?

8 Apr

First things first, you need to know the layout of part of where I live. I am in a basement suite within a house, when I leave my suite I am in a hallway, go to the right I end up in the laundry room, go to the left I am at the door to the wooooorld!…well, the backyard, but hey, it’s part of the world! 😉 lol

About a week ago when I came home I came through the door from the outside to the hallway and was struck by an unpleasant odour. It was faint but definitely there and I had no idea what it was. I wondered if the landlords (who live upstairs) cooked something that went horribly wrong and the scent made its way downstairs but other than that didn’t give it too much thought. I figured it’d be gone by the next day so no biggie.

Ha!

The next day it was still there, only stronger. The smell didn’t reach in to my suite, thank goodness, and it wasn’t in the laundry room, just the hallway. On the other side of the outer wall is where the garbage can and compost can are kept so I thought maybe its that and somehow the smell is getting inside but when I went outside I was greeted with the smell of fresh air, not the stench from the hallway. Well, what the hell…where is it coming from? I poked around the hallway a bit, moving shoes and random bits and pieces around thinking maybe food spilled and was going bad and if it was me that spilled it I’d better find it before my landlords did! Didn’t find a thing, except for a lot of dust, hey, neat freaks we are not, don’t judge! 😛 lol

Well, the landlords came home yesterday and today I ran in to one of them so we were chatting and the hallway smell came up in conversation. He had the door to the outside open to air the hallway out. Turns out the joke I made yesterday to a friend about something decomposing was the truth, ugh. A mouse got in to the wall, died, and is now in the process of decomposing and the oh-so-lovely smell is that…the smell of death when it isn’t buried.

dead mouse

Note to self: if I ever kill someone, bury them! 😉

So you’d think because of the open door for most of the day the smell would have at least faded a teeny tiny bit right? Well, wrong! I got home around 9pm and it was worse…Worse!! How that is even possible I do not know but oh man, it is so much more potent now, aaaaaaand it has spread so the laundry room reeks. *gag* I really hope it doesn’t spread in to my suite…

My landlord said this happened one other time, a mouse crawled in to the heating duct and died right near the vent so he had to take out a huge chunk of the heating duct because apparently the smell doesn’t come out of metal. He started talking about how the juices spread and lemme tell ya, all kinds of visuals popped in to my head, none of them pleasant!

Thing is, I am so sympathetic to all animals, well, not spiders but c’mon, they are creepy! that I feel really bad for this poor dead mouse. I keep thinking of this little mouse, thinking it has found a safe place and then falling down in to the deep dark depths of the wall, maybe it got hurt when it fell, maybe not, but either way it is stuck down there, unable to get back up cause it can’t climb the wall, slowly starving to death, being able to smell the food I’ve been cooking in my suite, thinking about all his mouse buddies who are wondering where he got off to, then being so desperate for food he starts gnawing at the wall only to get wall splinters in his stomach that make him hurt, maybe even slowly hemorrhage, until eventually he dies a horrible lonely scared death. Nobody deserves a death like that, poor little mouse. 😦

So yeah, I’m feeling bad for the mouse, cause that’s how I roll. But at the same time I’m really not enjoying the smell that I encounter every time I go in to the hallway and laundry room and even though its not the little mouse’s fault I really wish he could have not gotten caught in the wall of this particular house and brought this smell in to my life. Which is awfully selfish of me…sigh…

In case you are wondering, the landlord says there is nothing he can do, we have to “wait it out” which I guess is code for “wait till the maggots eat the flesh and juices from the corpse and there is nothing left to create a smell”.

Lovely.

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Extenuating Circumstances

15 Nov

extenuating

I don’t normally fail on day two of a challenge. Especially when I gave the challenge to myself. I did all kinds of things to make sure I not only rocked this one but I had fun and it was as easy as it could be.

Inspirational wall? Yup!

Goal Pants? Yup!

Groceries bought? Yup!

Food cooked a day in advance so I wasn’t running around crazy before work? Yup!

Calendar put on wall for easy visual tracking? Yup!

Lose It! and Runtastic App brought up to date and actually used? Yup!

Goal written out and taped to wall so I can remember why I’m doing this? Yup!

See? See how organized I was?!

Thing is, you can’t plan for everything no matter how hard you try, and sometimes things happen you weren’t even aware you had to plan for…more importantly, brace for.

It was a bad night at work today. It started off fine, like any other Friday evening shift. I was having a good time (I find my job fun), was mentally planning for errands I had to do after work, thinking about all kinds of random happy things when a sound I absolutely dread occurred.

The emergency alarm.

Crap.

Usually the emergency alarm turns out to be a false alarm or a situation I can at least deal with.

Tonight…not so much.

All those years I have been keeping my First Aid/CPR up to date, all those scenarios I am trained for, well, for the first time ever I had to utilize those skills, had to actually do what I had been taught in all those classes.

You know what I learned? Sometimes, no matter how hard you try, nothing works. 😦

I watched someone die tonight. While I was working on her she just…went away…I can’t get over how she was there and then she wasn’t…

Paramedics and firemen came, they worked on her also, they tried so hard but she was gone.

The rest of my night was spent doing my normal work stuff and handling all the things that go along with the death of a resident.

So you see, extenuating circumstances, they can mess with the best made plans, and ya know what, right now, I don’t even care that I messed up my eating for the day because I got reminded that there are things so so so much more important than the stupid, self involved, whiny crap I talk about on a daily basis.

After work I had to hit up the grocery store, besides what was on my list I bought a Chinese Almond Bun and a Lindt chocolate bar. Bad decision? Yes. Right way to deal with how I was feeling? No. Right now do I care that I totally blew my eating plan on day 2 of my challenge? No, cause ya know what, not everyday I watch someone die and frankly, not so sure I know how to deal with this.

All I can do is give myself time, and call my mom (which fyi, I will soooo be doing tomorrow! Would have done tonight except for stupid time zones that meant she was sleeping by the time I got home)…I have this mentality that my mom can fix anything, I know there isn’t anything in this situation she can fix but I also know I’ll feel better getting to hear her voice, hers and my dads.

So for now I have a sore stomach from the chocolate, I have teary eyes and I have the overwhelming urge to go to sleep and escape thinking about what happened today.

Tomorrow will be better, right?

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Loss

7 Dec

I had a great post for today, inspiration came to me last night for the topic and I was all psyched to write it but today I got sad news and now I’m having trouble organizing thoughts in my head let alone write a coherent blog post about what all of a sudden seems so trivial.

Someone I know died, not today, one day ago, but today is when I got told. I didn’t know her an exceptionally long time, almost six months, but I don’t think the depth of our feelings towards someone always need an especially long time to form. Sometimes you just happen to meet someone you connect with. She was older then me, had lived a long and full life, spent the end surrounded by those who loved her and took care of her even while she managed to maintain her independence. She was a character, someone whose personality is so large you always notice when she enters a room, it’s amazing how large of a presence she has considering she is such a tiny lady…I guess that should actually be how large of a presence she had considering she was such a tiny lady…past tense sucks.

It’s not like this is the first person I know whose died, nor (obviously) will it be the last (unless of course I die in my sleep tonight before anyone else I know has a chance to beat me to the other side but odds are doubtful since I’m fairly healthy). I’m unsure of myself with this mourning process, when I got told I didn’t cry, I didn’t all of a sudden have to sit, I didn’t have any reaction other then a softly said “oh no” and a quick shutting down of all emotions. I was in public, at work, at the beginning of my shift, an outburst of emotion would not of been appropriate so I shut it down before I had a chance to feel anything. Now, hours after my shift ended I keep thinking about it, it revolves around and around in my head, my memories of her.

I don’t pray, I have no rituals to get me through this, no fake comfort to draw on, no one to turn to, it is just me, sitting with thoughts of her in my head, thinking about how I didn’t get to say goodbye and how our last conversation wasn’t anything special, just an ordinary short conversation. She most likely didn’t even realize how fond of her I was, I hope she maybe had an inkling, a tiny hint of how great I thought she was, every time I saw her a huge smile came to my face and she always had one in return, maybe she knew from my smile? I don’t know. I’ll never know.

She went from healthy to a little health scare to dead in a week and a half, how does that happen so quickly? Not giving anyone a chance to say goodbye. Not that I wish she had a long lingering death but maybe just one more day of health so I could have seen her and talked to her once more, and how selfish is that of me? Thinking of myself when I only knew her six months, how much worse this all must be for her family, those who knew her their entire lives, who had memories going back fifty years or more. How do you accept and adjust your life to the loss of someone you knew for so long? I had trouble each and every time someone I knew died, but for the most part those people weren’t daily or even weekly fixtures in my life so my day to day existence didn’t register a change, but her daughters who saw her all the time, talked to her on the phone everyday, how do they rearrange their thoughts to accommodate this change? I guess they just will, not like they have a choice. And while they grieve, loudly or quietly, in public or private, with others or alone, I hope they realize that others also mourn the loss of this wonderful woman, this lady who brought a smile to people’s faces, who took her own approach to life and screw anyone who tried to judge her, who was fearless and funny and quirky and who will be missed, even by those who show no emotion to the news and who in public anyways will seem utterly unaffected by her absence.

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The Spider Conspiracy

31 Aug

I hate bugs, insects, aracnids…anything little, creepy, with lots of legs that could get in to my mouth/ears/nose while I am sleeping…I hate them all. They all know this and go out of their way to try to make me go insane, it’s a conspiracy!

I swear they all talk to each other (much like animals in cartoon movies do) and they create strategies for how to cause mayhem in my life.

I handle this brutally harsh treatment by Waging War – oh yeah, they are goin down! bwahahahaha (er, that’s my evil laugh 😉 )

Now, I’m not going out of my way to kill these evil-doers, I don’t kill them if I am outside as I consider that their home and it would be rude to go to their home and kill them. But! When they come in to my residence, well, that is an act of agression that can only end one way – in their death.

When the ants tried to take over the bathroom a couple years ago I made it my mission to get rid of every last one of them, I bought Raid Ant traps (which seemed to hold no appeal to them at all! waste of money, erg), I sprayed Windex (which lots of people claim will kill any insect/bug type creature – uh, it doesn’t!) and then I fought dirty, hehehe, I waited them out, and everytime a new one popped up from wherever the hell they were entering from it was immediately squished. I thought about propping their mangled squashed bodies on the ends of tooth picks and leaving them out as a warning to the other ants but figured with my luck it’d just attract more of the little buggers and the dead staked ants would be turned in to martyrs for the insects cause.

Eventually I conquered the ants in the bathroom but sadly, it was a case of winning the battle, not the war.  😦

The next wave of attackers were spiders and they have yet to stop! Of all the various insects/bugs out there the worst of the worst are the aracnids. I experience a level of terror when I see them unlike anything else…luckily my fight or flight instincts lean to Fight so instead of screaming like a pansy I, well, ok, I screech a bit, then I swear, then I jump in to action and do my damndest to kill the thing…unless I am at my parents, then I scream and point and my mom being the brave awesome woman that she is swears (at me, not the spider lol) then kills it while muttering about the ridiculousness of the situation. lol.

Last night they crossed a line and they continued to cross the line tonight so now it’s time for me to go on the offensive. No longer can I be fighting in a defensive manner, No, this war has obviously gone to the next level! I feel it is obvious to see that the spiders have chatted amongst themselves and called to their front lines the bravest of their brave, those willing to sacrifice for the cause, those willing to push the barriers and go where no spider has yet gone (at least in this apartment) and boy did they get some daredevils when they called to arms.

Last night, while I was in the bathroom washing up for bed I noticed something odd in the mirror’s reflection, took me a minute to realize what I was seeing and when my brain was finally able to understand what the site was well, let’s just say it’s a good thing I can’t get in trouble for swearing anymore lol. The fan in the ceiling, guess who was doing a daredevil dangling routine from it? Making it’s way sloooowly down down down getting closer an closer to the level of my head? Yeah, that’s right! A nasty freakin huge spider! Ack!!! That is just soooooooo wrong!

Then tonight I was in the kitchen making my dinner and from somewhere, I think maybe from under the microwave (but if that is right, wtf was it doing there? and how’d it get there??) a spider appeared. On. The. Counter! That is just…not allowed!  I call foul! It’s bad enough when they are on the ceiling crawling along, or on the walls, or doing a kamikaze run across the living room floor but ON THE KITCHEN COUNTER?!?!?!?!? NoooOOOooo! How can I be expected to deal with that??

Now, before you start judging me, my kitchen is not dirty. It may not be Martha Stewart clean but it is normal-person-clean. I don’t leave crumbs on the counter, I tidy up after myself, I don’t leave dirty dishes laying around – I don’t know what the hell was on the counter that was appealing to that spider (probably nothing, I think his mission was to inflict a heart-stopping moment on me, the innocent human, in the hopes of weakening me for further attacks by his brethren) but damn straight I am taking note of this shift in the battle lines and responding in kind.

From here on out I will not be The Human Who Kills When She Sees Us But Is Easily Mocked Cause She Doesn’t Know How Much We Hang In Her Place Without Her Knowing It – the name I am positive the spiders and other insects have for me. No! I will hence forth be known to all in the creepy crawly world as The Evil Beotch Who Has Sprayed Her Entire Apartment With Various Insecticides And Has Created A Toxic Environment For Us. Let’s see whose laughing now! Course, with my luck it’ll still be the spiders laughing cause I’ll die from toxic fumes and they’ll take over the place when my corpse is removed…evil bastards. There’s no winning!

p.s. case you were wondering, I used the glass I was holding to attempt to squish the spider on the counter but turns out it dips up a bit at the bottom so all I did was trap the spider under the glass instead of squish it – when I lifted the glass all quick-as-a-bunny so I could squish it with wadded paper towel the evil thing clung to the bottom of the glass so I couldn’t kill it, I had to put the glass back down before it realized it had an escape route – is their no end to their fiendish ways??? I did eventually manage to kill it but it was dicey and has left me in a creeped out state – part of the Spider Army’s plan no doubt

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