Can I have my brain back now? Please?

I feel that I should be reading all kinds of self-help books about grief and had a couple suggested to me--The Year of Magical Thinking and The Mourner's Dance. Thing is, I can't read very well and I can barely write because the adrenaline is gone. I feel like I have a family of squirrels nesting in my cranium.

In addition to my inability to read or write coherently, I can't follow conversations well. At all. I'm a visual learner. I need pictures and I need to actually do what I need to learn. I can't follow verbal information unless I can run the meeting or take over the conversation with questions. I'm always like that. Now, I feel like I'm under water when people are talking.

When people write about depression, they often talk about going to a dark place. But my place isn't all dark, it's kind of stupid really. It's a foggy, stupid place.

Also, I have the attention span of a gnat. But that's been a problem since I had children. Actually, having children was the time the first couple of squirrels moved in, ate some grey matter and replaced it with fluffy nesting material.

I decided I'd make up my own stages of grief. A couple of them are mine, but a couple are the real thing. Can you tell which is which?

1. Anger - Did a post on this. Nuff said.
2. Projectile vomiting - Did a post on this too.
3. Seeking a geographical cure - Since most accidents happen close to home, let's move. Now! But, since packing up my family and moving us all to Sudbury is impractical, I signed up for a cycling trip to Spain in April. See also #4.
4. Retail therapy - Superficiality is the balm for my soul: bought stuff, have become an avid reader of People magazine because the story lines are easy to follow, actually started whitening my teeth with those Crest White Strips in my drawer and now do the occasional mud mask. And yet, I'm not watching the Oscar's? Why? Too hard to follow. Too many names and title thingies.
   
5. Bitterness - Don't feel there's much of a point to being optimistic. Especially when I think back to New Year's Eve when my husband and I clinked our glasses together and said 2010 would be "a good year". What were we thinking? Am now so negative that I figure if my plane to Spain doesn't crash, I'll probably get hit by a car while riding around Mallorca on the fancy rental racing bike.
6. Depletion - Not feeling resilient. Dealing with my brother in law's death, my husband's heart failure and various house woes, including bed bugs over the past five or six years has me running on empty.
   

Need a plan, Stan. Maybe the answer isn't meditation--it's medication. Oh, what a difference one tiny letter makes.

Speaking of typos, my own personal favourite occurred a while back when I accidentally ended a work e-mail with "Retards" instead of "Regards" and no one noticed.

Time to get out of Dodge -- and I don't mean my Caravan

I'm still knee-deep in anger and self-pity. But I often think of my beloved Aunt Kathy, who always said, "No one gets a free pass through life."

She would know. She was a palliative care nurse in Sudbury--one of the best. She and her colleague were killed by a transport truck while en route to their patients in 2001. She was a beautiful person and is still so sorely missed.

I thought about Aunt Kathy a lot this past hellish week when we had to go and identify my brother in law at the hospital after his fatal snowmobile crash. Every step of this awful journey I've thought of Aunt Kathy's husband, children, mother, brother and sister (my mother), and what they went through eight and a half years ago.

I think my uncle knew that and that's why he and his youngest son came to Ottawa for the funeral to be with us. And why his daughter sent me gourmet homemade lasagna and his friend made my favourite cookies and fudge and why my parents and sister and her family came and supported us so completely.

The kindness of others is humbling. I feel so grateful for that kindness, but it makes me cry.

And then I get angry again. I know it's irrational and many people have it much worse, but right now, all I can think is that Ottawa has done us no favours. It's just been a litany of bullshit, sickness and now, death.

If I were Jewish, I would think all this hardship was a divine message to move to the Holy Land. But I'm not. I'm not religious at all. I wish I were, but I can't suspend my disbelief.

I’m thinking the message here is that “it’s time to get out of Dodge.” This is what's known as "seeking the geographical cure".

But my mother says that you can’t outrun tragedy. It always finds you. I wish tragedy was blind, deaf and crippled, so I could stand half a chance on the run from it.

Where would we go? Sudbury. That’s where my people are. But we won’t. Lack of employment opportunities “up North”, better medical care in Ottawa, and my husband's parents and some pretty terrific friends are what hold us here.