moncoeur

Hi Hikermom I completely resonate with your feelings of being disconnected and wanting to feel like happiness comes naturally and is not just a front we put on for the rest of the world and sometimes ourselves. We want more than to just make it through another day to just make it through another day. Anniversaries are very hard. I am coming up on my second next week. ( Can it really be two years already) Wasn't he just here? Sometimes I almost think we want MORE out of life now than we did before because we know how fleeting it is. These mundane things/struggles were just part of life before our loss that we never paid much attention to before. Now because of what we had to go through sometimes I'm like ok God I just need a break here. I'm already struggling to keep it together and now you give me this shit. The annoyances seem larger than they once did. I am very proud of you and you are such a positive point of inspiration and encouragement. Keep ridding the waves. and we are here to keep ridding them with you. Sending you some hugs ( I know I'm a day late) and thinking of you and hoping you are well now that you are past that day. xoxox M

Jen, I have those days too. I have those days where I just don't want to keep going but the thing is that I do. I don't know how or why but I somehow manage to stay on the earth. I had days where I was ready to check out, during the first year after my husband died, and then those feelings resurfaced about a month ago. Both times the same tactic seemed to work. I proceed as though I was going to check out and I thought well if I am going to check out anyway it won't matter if I am here one more day or do this one more thing. I think literally thinking just focusing on one thing made life seem less overwhelming. I literally took one moment at a time, then one task at a time, then one day at a time and the days turned to weeks and I am still here. It is ok to just get through the moments. It is ok to say you can't handle it and then surprisingly enough you end up doing what you thought you could never do. I also thought what if it was reversed and I died and my husband was here and he was so miserable that he took his own life how would that make me feel and honestly it just felt awful. I fully imagined what it would be like for him and imagined finding him. The thought of him being that sad and desperate snapped me out of it because I know he would never want that for me and your husband would not want that for you either. So one day I just made the decision that I was not going to have checking out be an option anymore. So I proceed as though I am needed. It sounds very much as though you are needed as well. I wish I could take your pain away but know that we are here for you.

I hear the song from our wedding video almost every afternoon. We had a routine of calling each other every day at noon and there are days I get really stressed at work and I will hear that song and feel better. There are others but that is the most calming. I think when we are missing them just out of the blue that is them missing us too.

A visit is comforting but I don't know for sure of course. There were a couple I thought were visits, but most of my dreams he is sick so I think that is just my brain being traumatized. Maybe it can be both?

I find the guilt to be the hardest thing to overcome. I am almost 20 months and I can't let it go. I feel responsible for him because I was the one making the decisions in his cancer care. I took him to a hospital he didn't want to go to because I thought it was the best, that hospital was a nightmare, and then he died. I wish when first said he was sick that we would have pushed and pushed the doctors to dig deeper to find the cause of his pain not just write us off with pain killers. Had I been pushier sooner he would still be here. There are lots of things I feel guilty about. I don't know that I will ever feel free again.

That has happened to me too. Things will seem to be find and then I will be depressed out of the blue and at one point I will look at the calendar and see it's the 14th and know why I am so sad. hugs hun!

So 20 months.... there are some days I think I am going to open a door walk into the room and he is going to be there. That this was all some horrible dream, or some mistake. But I open the door and of course he is not there, it is hard to imaging that he is never coming back. I have to wear his wedding ring around my neck so I can prove to myself that he really was here and not a dream.

If I had know then what I know now I would have made different decisions, but the fact is that I didn't and like you all say above getting a straight answer out of a doctors can be an act in futility. The absolute last thing I wanted to hear was that my husband was going to die, I was of the mindset that if they said those words out loud then they would be true and I didn't want to hear it. I thought if I prayed hard enough and believed enough for both of us that we would be those 1% assholes who make it. But of course we were not. I hate that the disease companies only talk about the survivors. They never talk about the reality of cancer and how much it sucks. It's always smiling faces showing how strong of fighters they are. I hate the ridiculous cancer commercials too! Hospitals can be terrifying places and I don't understand a system that is more than happy to rack up charges that can bankrupt you but doesn't have the time to sit and answer a few questions. I wish our first doctor would have just explained the situation to us that treatment was palliative not curative. My husband had stage 4 colon cancer and our doctor said we may still have a curable disease. So imaging my shock when I see my husband start to deteriorate after his first chemo treatment. I second guess every decision I made, I wish I had taken another path. I wish I had fought for him more, there are so many things I wish but in the end my wishing wasn't enough. I hate that medicine is a business because you cannot trust a doctor when it is about profit. I hate that most of our conversations were around insurance and whether or not they would pay for treatment before he did the recommended treatment. My husband was just a commodity to make money, if there was a treatment but our insurance didn't cover it then they would just let him die. The thing is this is reality for most people. That if you have the wrong insurance or not enough or not any then you don't get treatment. I work in the free medical clinic in my town and when I do the patient testimonials they say they trust our doctors more than the doctors in private clinics or hospitals. They also say they get better care with us and don't want to leave once they get insurance and no longer qualify to be our patients. But even in my clinic I get discouraged at the callousness of our doctors. I tell our nursing director what a bitch she is and she says that being horrible wards off cancer and only the good ones go. I hate that she says shit like that to me knowing my husband died of cancer. There are people in this world that make me just want to give up sometimes. When it is my turn to face cancer and statistically it will be, knowing I don't have an advocate or a caregiver, and how hard just being in treatment is I would just let my time run out. I wish I could sleep at night with a feeling that I did the best I could and got him the best care I could but that is not the way I feel. I feel like I picked the wrong team, that had I gone left instead of right he would still be here or would have been here longer. I feel like I chose MD Anderson because they have the best marketing for being ranked number one. I would say they gave the worst care we experienced and it is so hard to live with the decision to move him there. I feel like I was duped into taking him there because they were supposed to be the best. When it is about money,advertising, and profits how can you ever know for sure you did the right thing? Cancer is a truly horrible thing, and the experience of the medical system can make it worse sometimes.

I appreciate you all writing in. I did read When bad things happen to good people right after my husband passed away. It does give some perspective. I liked the part where he talks about not going to temple to talk to God but to talk to the people who are in the temple, but a lot of the time it feels false. I get really irritated at church when people say God is good or prayer works, because ya it didn't work for us. It doesn't work for a lot of people. That is like saying gee I hope you are on the "right" prayer chain or you won't get the help you need. I just can't believe in a God that plays favorites anymore. So maybe you are right we are here to just help each other get through. Some days it just seems like people are just not worth all the trouble. My work is a really negative place, which doesn't help. I just want to shake them and say "why are you like this" feel lucky you are alive because so many really awesome people are gone. It makes them happy to make others miserable and I just don't understand why they are like that. It makes it really hard to see the good in people. I also work at the free medical clinic of my town so see some pretty horrible things, and hear about some really horrible situations and it just hurts that there are so many rotten people out there. I don't fell like it's my job to fix the world, it just hurts that people are this cruel to each other. It seems to be a rarity that I interact with really awesome people and just feel like I am surrounded by assholes. I will look into the other book Man's Search For Meaning. What you wrote helped or at least put things in perspective, that looking for meaning is an ambitious task, not something that is just innate inside of us and we know why we are here and what we are doing. I just wish I didn't feel this way, I just wish I could see some good sometimes ya know. Thank you for the warm thoughts everyone!

Tried grief counseling as well.....

I have an older widow friend who says that to me, and I just look at her like with the F is wrong with you? Your husband died you think there was a reason for that? On and the part about if that is true then God is kind of a d*ck was so right on. I have been thinking that a lot lately. If this is a grand design is is a really really crappy one. It is unjust and unfair. Well Said!

So this is my first time posting on the new boards. I was on the old boards but took a break for quite a while. It has been about 19 months since my husband died. For a while I was doing really really good. I was going to work I was making plans, just getting on with life. Lately I just can't seem to shake this internal sadness. I can't find meaning or purpose in life anymore. If I feel good for a moment because something went well I immediately start to feel sad. Life has just been kicking me and I was already down. Things are not good with my current living situation, my job is horrible, and I have lost my faith in God. Honestly the last one and thinking I was going to get to see my husband again when I died was really holding me together and I just wanted him to be proud of me. Now I don't even have faith in that anymore. Everything feels so empty and pointless I go to work and I come home and go to bed by 7:00. I need to stay up and apply for other jobs but I just can't stay awake. I feel like I am just counting down the days until it's my turn to go and this is no way to live. I have seen a doctor, I have antidepressants that I have been on almost a year. I just don't know what else to do. Did anyone go through a relapse in depression? How did you find meaning in your life again?

So I haven't been around in a while, at lease 6 months if not more. I was glad I was invited along to the new boards. I really like the new look as well, thought I am sorry to see the history of the old boards go. This is just a quick note to say hello again.