Feeling sorry for myself.

[sikeuritgadeun]

My life is falling apart.  I don't know how to turn it around.  I loved him for years.  How do I love another?  The one who I met after DH died, doesn't want me.  He wooed me and I fell for him and now it's over.  There's trouble at home and I want to run away but I have too many responsibilities.  I thought things would get better after seven years but they haven't.  It has become harder each passing year.  I don't know how long this can go on.  Thanks for reading, I had to get this out and this is the only place I can go.  The upcoming holidays are not helping either.  It makes life all the more miserable for me.

[Adley]

I'm sorry Sike. I try my damnedest to keep a good attitude, but its like swimming upstream. Like denying reality. I never did like fake people or negative people; now its a struggle not to be one or the other. My sexy widowed Saturday night was watching Pocahontas ll and sneaking mixed drinks till the kids went to sleep. All the things I teach the kids- hunting, fishing, farming, livestock, freakin lit and math and physics and biology- are just out of a sense of duty to them. I no longer enjoy my passions.  Things won't be funny anymore.

    I remarried. I used to think husband abuse was some kind of joke. When I had to send her down the road, it kinna feels like I sent all my lifelong romantic ideals with her. Is life really this bitter and hard? 

    Now I know that marriage only ends one of

two ways,and the most successful marriage has the worst ending. What a cruel trick! And life goes on alright. And then we find ourselves becoming cynical realists, mourning the passing of joie de vie that dwelt on the sunny slopes of long ago. I feel your pain. And I accidentally spilled some vodka in my coffee. It really will get better I reckon. Let's all just lean on each other. Thanks, Sike, and everybody else for being there.

[sikeuritgadeun]

It is a cruel joke, isn't it.  The best marriage, the person you thought you would grow old with, taken away and we are here, drifting.  Trying to swim upstream, struggling, seeing the shore ahead but it keeps getting farther away.  Yes, the happiness we had, the future was ours,.  It was fun while it lasted.  Then we are here alone trying to grasp how to live, how to become whole again but how can we?  We lost a part of us that helped make us who we were.  Probably the best part of us.  Our loss is irreplaceable.  What I had with my DH is gone.  I am adrift in this world now.  I don't fit in.  I don't know how to anymore.  Life as I knew it when DH was alive is like a dream.  I am now living in an unknown reality that I am finding it very hard to escape from.

 

[Adley]

    Yes, the irony of it is nearly unbearable. Nearly. A thought just crossed my mind of people I've known who've lost a limb. They indeed get stronger. But with the few I've known there always seems to be some bitterness lingering under the surface.

  I read an older post on here (sorry I can't remember the author) that stated that everyone's problems seem stupid because they are fixable. Death is not.

  I couldn't agree more and I'm sure we can all relate.

  The reason I bring up amputee's is (besides thinking of an old one-legged friend who died recently) they have lost something that won't come back. Now they can get a hook or a pegleg or a state of the art bioengineered prosthetic, but the one made for them isn't coming back. Of course I'm not saying the losses are the same, as I'd rather lose both legs than my wife. At least she and I could joke about it. But there are some parallels and I was just musing. . . .

[SemperFidelis]

Yes adley you are right about the prosthetic comparison.

 

This life after death(that is as lived by the widow) is irritating shit..... I just miss the ease of how things were before, even when they weren't easy.

[tybec]

“Getting over it so soon? But the words are ambiguous. To say the patient is getting over it after an operation for appendicitis is one thing; after he’s had his leg off is quite another. After that operation either the wounded stump heals or the man dies. If it heals, the fierce, continuous pain will stop. Presently he’ll get back his strength and be able to stump about on his wooden leg. He has ‘got over it.’ But he will probably have recurrent pains in the stump all his life, and perhaps pretty bad ones; and he will always be a one-legged man. There will be hardly any moment when he forgets it. Bathing, dressing, sitting down and getting up again, even lying in bed, will all be different. His whole way of life will be changed. All sorts of pleasures and activities that he once took for granted will have to be simply written off. Duties too. At present I am learning to get about on crutches. Perhaps I shall presently be given a wooden leg. But I shall never be a biped again.”

― C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

 

This quote, among others from this book, hit home in describing what it is like to lose your person, for me.  As a Christian, I vowed to be one, and I lost half of me.  To rebuild has been the most difficult task of my life, even beyond my father's long illness with Alzheimer's, my infertility issues, my DHs treatable cancer. 

 

I don't run, but I walk well most days, but the pain is still there, but you learn to live with it somehow. 

 

I understand.