THE LIES
by Zoe
(MD)
How many times before his death, I heard it. How many million of times after his death have I heard it. You will survive, you will heal, and it will be less painful. It is a lie. I wish it were true, I wish there was some level of hope I could offer, but the fact is it does not get better, or easier. What happens is you get better at hiding your feelings. No, that is a lie too, what happens is that the basic needs of work to pay bills forces you to hold in the pain that you feel.
It has been three months since my beloved John died. I close my eyes and I see him, I remember what it feels like to have his arms around me, his smile, his smell. I move in a vacuum, nothing touches me anymore, oh, I do what I have to, those mundane things that make the outside world think you heal, but there is no healing. We were going to move into our new home, I could not live in the house we had so carefully and lovingly chosen; so I am buying a different home, in a different state. My daughter and her husband are going to stay with me, so I will not be alone. I nod and smile. It does not matter if they are there or not, I am alone, totally and utterly alone.
I go to my office; I do my work; I move through the day hoping that no one looks too closely at me, for there is nothing truly here, a glass figure where a woman used to be. I wear his ashes around my neck and I touch them a thousand times a day, trying to get some feel of him. There is no feel of him. Instead, I close my door and weep because the raw jagged pain that is my soul cannot be controlled.
I talk to a well-meaning therapist friend who tells me I will have to feel my pain. So at night I allow myself to feel and what comes is a white-hot searing pain that leaves nothing but ash behind. There is no lessening of the pain with time or "feeling it", because he is not here, the only way for the pain to recede is for him to be here, but he is not. He lies as well. How do you counsel when you have no idea what it is to have lost yourself? Feeling this kind of pain not just to feel it emotionally, but physically. I pray for sleep, but it only comes with pills. I hope for sleep with no dreams, just nothingness, the seduction of the pills. However, even that is a lie, now I dream and in all dreams I find a dead body, I cannot escape death.
Everything I have read, everything I have been told is a lie. I am dying inside, I feel nothing but pain and grief. There is only one truth, and the longer time passes the more I am certain of it, I cannot do this without him.
