Day Two

I bought some books about grief.  I haven’t looked at them yet.

I don’t know where to start.  It’s like a mountain of All The Things.  The immediate things:  Michael’s death and my sadness and, to some extent, guilt, and just trying to put the pieces back in place and go to work and do the things that I need to do.  The things before:  the last two years and Michael’s gradual erosion and refusal (inability?) to do anything different; his increasing vagueness and forgetfulness, the depression and anxiety and control and everything else that was pushing me straight off the edge, too.  The long years before the porphyria diagnosis.  My mother’s death.  The early years of marriage, the conflicts with my son, trying to keep everyone happy all the time, the walking on eggshells.  The years before… the years that we were in separate places.  What it was in me that thought I could help, that let love for my best friend and my own need to be with someone, to be wanted, override common sense.  But I still wonder… I still wonder if this could have had a different ending.  Or were we both so damaged that this result was inevitable?

Michael used to ask me if I would do this again.  For four years, the answer was always yes.  I would have done it more wisely, I would have had better insight into what some of the problems would be, I would have learned things and done things better.  I would have been braver.  But the last two years… the answer was hell, no.  I never said that to him.  But it was the truth.  I could not bear watching him slowly die.  I could not bear watching him do things that were directly counterproductive, sending people out for junk food, making excuses to eat, not doing anything to help.  And it was so hard for him, I know.  I know that he tried so hard… but yet, he could not try in a meaningful way, a way that would stick for more than a day or two.  He would make plans, and they would come to nothing.  I would offer to help… but there was nothing to help with, no plan, and any plan I tried to impose was just a battleground.  I would not do the last two years.  Most of all, I would not do the fall of 2011, when every night I was taking pills and drinking just to be able to tolerate being there at all.  I was so depressed and desperate and exhausted, and I had no idea what to do or even how to ask for help.  And I could not bear how he treated the kids and other people.  Constantly sniping and complaining and being irritable with other people just existing around him.  I understand a lot of the whys.  It would probably have been easier for him with just the two of us.  But it would have killed me.  The kids were my support, when they should not have had to be.  It might be different if I’d felt that I was, say, bringing him joy in his last days or something.  But it wasn’t like that.  We just hurt each other over and over again.  Ironically, it was just before he died that I really thought that there was a chance that things were getting better.  But maybe I was hearing the wrong things.  So many things, in retrospect, that I should have listened to differently.

The most awful thing is that I know how much he loved me.  That he loved me as much as it is possible to love a person.  That no one will ever love me like that again.  And yet that love wasn’t enough to make it through the dysfunction and the childhood issues and the dissociation and the illness.  True love isn’t the magic spell.  I cannot be sorry that he’s dead and free, but I would give anything to be able to put my arms around him again and just hold him and tell him how much I loved him, and have him truly understand that.