Dying is easy, living is harder.






I am a little obsessed with the play "Hamilton" right now. I haven't seen it yet but it is coming to town soon and I'm stalking the website for when tickets will be on sale.  In the meantime I listen to the soundtrack almost constantly in my car.  Remarkably, what with it being about a war and all, there is a lot of death in "Hamilton".  One line repeats itself in several songs "Dying is easy, living is harder" Pretty sure the writer of Hamilton is familiar with grief because that line just says so much.

When I go to the Doctor for my anti-depressants they always make me feel out this 'how is your mental state form' One of the questions is: have you thought about death or dying in the last week? uh yes, I always mark yes. I thought about death or dying within in the last hour if not the last ten minutes. I always think about it.  But I don't want the Dr to get the wrong idea so I always write off to the side, "But not mine, Dan's"  I think about Dan's death and dying and being dead all the time. It just is always there, because he's dead.  But sometimes I think about me dying.

I was in therapy the other day, she likes to tell me how much I've over come and how well I'm doing and stuff like that.  How hard I've worked. And it hit me, she's right, she's actually right, I have worked my ASS off to make this whole widow thing work. I didn't give myself a choice, there was no choice. I worked and I worked and I struggled and struggled to try and make this "ok" knowing full well that it will never be ok, but that I had to keep going.  I was going to make this work. I just was. (Dan always thought I had a stubborn streak) I have never worked so hard at anything, not even pregnancy (which was a doozy, maybe I'll right about it someday when I get done with this whole grief thing) It is impossible to describe how much work it was to breathe, to eat, to put clothes on. I used to stop walking and just close my eyes, wherever I was, at Baby Girls school, at the store, at church, walking down the side of the road, I would just stop and close my eyes. I knew it was odd when I was doing it but it just would happen. My body had to stop moving, it had to actually concentrate on breathing, I had to focus just to put one foot in front of the other. No wonder I was so exhausted.

 Then that line from Hamilton popped into my head.  I started to cry, a lot.  "Sometimes I think just dying would have been easier. Or even just locking my doors and hiding under my blankets. Shutting out the world, shutting out life." Ya that definitely would have been easier then forcing myself to live every day.

I get mad at Dan a lot these days. I've never yelled at him so much in my life then I have since he died. I'm mad at him for leaving me, for taking the easy road, for dying.  Dan didn't want to die, he had as little choice in it as I did, which in case you didn't know was none at all.  Dan wanted to be with us more then anything. Dan loved us more then anything. Dan would have stayed here and struggled through life with us if he were only given the chance. Yet part of me goes, it's not fair, Dan got the easy job, dying is easy, he's in heaven right now partying away with Jesus.  I got the crappy hard job. I got the job of staying alive, I got the job of going through life without him, I got the job of raising Baby Girl all by myself.  I got the broken, shattered heart that still forces itself to get up everyday.

All of this I just wrote and it is no where close to expressing how it feels. there are no words that are adequate enough. Just trust me when I tell you it hurts like undescribed hell.

Dying is easy, living is harder. It's not fair that you got the easy job Dan.

I wrote a book about my grief, you can read it here: Carry on Castle

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

PTSD is not for sissys

Image
Do you know what PTSD is? Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I bet you think you do.  You might say something like "ya its what people that go off to war have" true. You might say "It's when people see really terrible things" true. A few really smart people might say "ya my friend watched her beloved husband die and now she has it" very true. If you are a mental health professional you might say "ya a child who all of a sudden has a dad who dies will have it" also true.  I was telling a friend once about how life is now without Dan and she said "wow it's almost like you have PTSD or something." No not almost, we do. But what exactly is it? Well it's complicated. I can't describe it for baby girl because I am not in her mind (unfortunately) but I can try and describe it for me. I am hesitant to do so; it's not an easy thing to talk about, But if we are going on a the point of this blog is to be therapeutic for me and h
Read more

The Floor

Image
I pulled him off of our bed and onto the floor. The 911 dispatcher told me to. She said it would help him breathe. I grabbed his ankles and pulled hard on his legs. He fell to the floor with a loud thump. I gasped at the loudness of it, but he didn’t move on his own at all. He didn't shake his head and say, “Ow, what’d you pull me off the bed for?” He didn't do anything. He just laid there. She told me to lift his neck up to help him breathe. I tried, but it was hard to move him, and I didn't want to hurt him.  I put my head on his chest again and again, I couldn’t tell if he was breathing, I couldn’t tell if that was his heartbeat or mine that I heard as he laid on the floor.  “Daddy! Wrestle with me!” she would shout, as she jumped into him and they landed on the floor. It was their favorite game. She would pound him and he would exaggerate the impact, clutching his stomach and lifting his legs in the air.  “You got me good, baby girl!” he would tell her. She would grin i
Read more

Milestones in grief

Image
                                                                Dan and I around 2011 I wrote this for a writing contest about milestones. Writing about every grief milestone would take a book and I had a word limit so I couldn't do that. I tried to do the really big ones. I have not had a particularly eventful life. When I was eight, my parents moved, but they took me with them. At ten, I had a pretty bad accident, but I came out of it fine. My husband and I met at sixteen, and at nineteen, we went against all good advice and got married. I gave birth to our daughter when I was 27.   I loved our boring, normal life. We were living our happily ever after. I was a stay at home mom, Dan was finishing up grad school. Everyone says this kind of thing at funerals, but Dan really was the most amazing person I’ve ever met in my life. He wanted to save the world: the people, the animals, the ecosystem. He wanted to make the world better, and he was. I loved our little family and couldn
Read more