Category: My Story

The Problem of Pain is Not Pain

The problem of pain is not pain. It is that nothing and no one prepared me for pain. Nothing in my life taught me how to face my sister’s murder, especially not my faith, or community or parents or anything in my life up to that point. And I am not a particularly fragile person. In fact, most would say I am resilient.

We have faced hard things in our marriage, like all marriages, with our children, like most children, in my upbringing, the most dysfunctional upbringing, in our company with fraud. My approach was always to get stronger and stronger, if that was possible. Apply more grit. Dig deeper for more reserves.

Build more scar tissue. But nothing made the deep cut of Holly’s death less painful. And nothing had prepared me for the suffering.

My beloved sister, torn from this earth, from her beautiful children, from a life of service, from me. I needed her. She was my friend. A confidant. We laughed at life together. She coached me on raising a child on the spectrum, how do they learn in public schools? I coached her on being married to someone with depression, though I am no expert. I have just experienced depression, lived with it, lived through it, survived it though it nearly destroyed me. I fought back. And I was loved. I had something to live for beyond myself. My partner, children, mother, sisters. I fought back from the black dog that nips at me all the live long day. The dog that barks at me telling me “It’s not worth it, this living.” I know it is a lie. But a believable one on dark days. But I didn’t see clearly enough what they were going through.

The problem of pain is not pain. I suppose we all expect that life will bring some ups and downs. But nothing in my life prepared me for murder. The violence, the atrocity, the apparent hatred, the cruelty. Knowing my brother-in-law sits in prison only fuels my rage. He doesn’t deserve to live if she is dead.

The problem of pain is that people don’t know how to be with you. They grow uncomfortable with your suffering. They fade away. The isolation of pain is the problem of pain. I am left alone, inside my head, with my howling grief ripping and tearing me to shreds.

And I realized today, trying to express myself to someone, that I am afraid. I am terrified to live. I am paralyzed by the trauma of losing my sister. I’ve got my heart locked down so “safe” that I’m hardly human. Except in church – where without my permission – the grief is leaking out. It streams down my face in an embarrassing fashion.  And though I wish I could make it stop, a part of me is so grateful to feel a relief and a release.

I am not fit for humans, I am thinking.

Where do you want to get connected in church, I am asked.

I’ll do anything. But I don’t think you want me to I am so damaged.

The problem of pain isn’t pain. It is that people don’t like to watch someone in pain. Or be with you. Perhaps because they don’t know how to help. But today I sat with someone who just listened. Who without saying much communicated to me that it is okay that I feel afraid, anxious, sad, angry and alone.

The problem of pain is not pain. It is that we don’t know how to be with someone in pain.

On Aging, On Living.

We’ve returned from visiting my in-laws, who are 82 and 80. They are very spry. So alive though slowing. I admire them. They’ve traveled the world together. They’ve had such curiosity, such courage.

Siesta Key, Florida

When did I become so afraid? Life’s beat the courage out of me without a doubt. The deaths. My mother’s physical pain and suffering. My headaches. The mental health challenges in myself and my family.

Sobriety taught me not to trust myself. Or was it alcoholism? My family’s unraveling after our parent’s deaths. My sister who chose not to have me as a part of her life. The ultimate failure to be quite honest when your own flesh and blood rejects you. That pain is insufferable, on the daily, sometimes.

I’ve raised the white flag. I surrender to loneliness. Fear has me in a chokehold. I’ve been hiding out. I have never felt more alone in all the years of my life.

My therapist is frequently telling me that’s not who I am. I owe it to myself to be courageous, to be curious, to be learning, and to create. That I have something to say. That my creativity matters. The world is worse off for my muteness. What I see in the world is unique. I used to believe that. My father conveyed an idea that we all have something unique to offer the world, our mark. I’m just no longer convinced that we’re all special.

When you are quiet for such a long time, you don’t trust your voice. Clearing my throat before speaking startles me. It better be worth it. Fraught with doubt. Frequently, I think never mind. Who cares?

I have a partner that creates no matter what, no matter if no one’s listening. That’s bold. That’s brave. That’s also ridiculous to me at times. You wouldn’t believe how much time he spends toiling away alone in his studio with no clue as to what’s happening in real life, in my kitchen, with the kids, with me.

Everything in me, how I was raised, says that’s selfish. Perhaps the answer is somewhere in the middle. My therapist says I need my own space. Where I can shut the door and be. I’m finally making it.

“You must not fear, hold back, count, or be a miser with your thoughts and feelings. It is also true that creation comes from an overflow, so you have to learn to intake, to imbibe, to nourish yourself, and not be afraid of fullness. The fullness is like a tidal wave, which then carries you, sweeps you into experience, and into writing. Permit yourself to flow and overflow, allow for the rise in temperature, all the expansions and intensifications. Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, and instabilities, and it always balances them.” The Diary of Anais Nin, Vol. 4

Here’s to reading. Here’s to travel. Here’s to curiosity. Here’s to creating. I’m hoping for it all.

I’m just scratching the surface of being alive.

Author’s image in reflection.

The Monster was Caged & Resting

I asked my son to write about his depression. I am trying to save him.

I want to know what it is like to be inside him. Him specifically because every person’s suffering is different. I know the exercise of putting words down on paper heals.

But I know depression only too well. It chases me. It’s never far. Though it’s been a good long while. The monster has been resting.

It’s been glorious to wake without it heavy on my bones.

If I’m lucky enough to live a while in peace, I fill my mind with other things, books, music poetry, and people who tell a different story one of liberation from the destruction, heavy, crushing demolition.

When I slow down now to remember – for I told him I would write, too and put down the words of depression – it feels like letting a monster out of its cage to play a while. A dangerous game. The monster only wants to kill. But if I visit, like in the zoo, perhaps I can view it from a safe distance.

Depression is dogged, relentless. It won’t let me sleep well, and the more fitful the sleep, the longer the dark days awake. Depression hurts me in my bones. It’s a deep ache, heavy, as if I’m full of sand. Each step, each breath, each thought more difficult than the last.

Yesterday, I heard it knocking, I learned I’ll be seeing someone, a family member, who has declared me unfit, unworthy of their love (and time), and the monster came to sit on my chest. Instantly, I was immobilized by anxiety. Meanwhile, it laughed deeply and ironically and climbed on top of me.

As I drove through the Wisconsin countryside, fighting to stay awake from a long day, a great big, emorphous tonnage of a monster crept up and pounced. I feel it now, the next day. On my ribcage. I can’t see it, only I feel it make itself at home on my ribcage. I can’t fling it off, too heavy, but also like water between my fingers, shape-shifting, magical but hideous.

So I am in danger right now. I’m at risk if i keep it to myself. I’ve never achieved anything important by myself when it comes to this monster.

I can distract myself, but that’s a dangerous addiction for me. I can retell my worthiness to myself, but the monster on my chest is about my value, and I’m no match on my own.

But pride always keeps me from speaking. I’m mute against the danger, the suffering which I know will come in the days ahead if I don’t speak aloud. “I am in danger.”

As I chase something truer than her lies, I’m already tired.

I’m already afraid.

I’m already beaten.

I know one of these times the monster will win.

Do I fight?

For now, she settles in. Ignores me. That is her superpower satisfied with scaring me close to death then slowly crushing the air from my lungs. I know if I don’t fight, she’ll more than ravage. Or maim. More than lay waste.

She will consume and kill me slowly, as asphyxiation finishes the job.

Right here, in this moment, being tired already, I don’t know. Perhaps I’ll go sit in the sunshine. That’s a microchoice toward life.

Just Tears

I’ve been on a winding path. One that’s taken me through valleys (yes, more than one) and to even lower places that I didn’t want to crawl out of because these days, just showing up for the people in my home is enough. I can’t be expected to be happy too.

I’m imagining a world in my daydreams where there’s no guns that kill sisters and no fractured families due to generations of anger. Where siblings don’t have to protect their heart by cutting off relationship with each other. Where friends don’t die of cancer. What children aren’t depressed. Where our body’s patience for our mental anguish doesn’t cause daily migraines. Where kids don’t have to think they’ve become adults via murder.

My thoughts are winding just like the path. I thought I’d stop living after I was done raising all the children in my house.

Not die physically, of course, but just lay down in a grassy spot by the path of life and see if it mattered that I don’t get up. Don’t think. Don’t feel. Don’t create. Don’t write. Don’t challenge ideas. Don’t be me.

I think the God that I thought had forgotten me has different plans, I don’t really want to hear them.

But as I sit in my first church, since before Covid, I’m melting. I can think of no other way to describe my insides, which were solid stone. I sit, and I feel deep inside me the flow of water starting. I sit in church and weep. Sometimes shuttering sobs threaten. Mostly quiet trickles, eyes closed, tears stream from me while I do my best just to BE. Open.

My church, this church, has a chorus of singers that makes me feel like I’m actually with Jesus. In a way never before in my life it’s just Jesus and me and I’m weeping all my rage, and disappointment, and fury, and exhaustion, and fear–oh my God so much fear that something terrible is just around the corner.  As if I’m a mole being whacked and each time I’m stupid enough to raise my head with any hop, whack. Whack. Whack.

Jesus does want me alive. For now, that’s enough.

Alternatively

I have often wondered about my mind. How it plays tricks on me. Foggy, crushing, chaos, creating doubt, self-hatred, despair; dragging my life down into depression.

I have learned to fake it, to pretend. Everything will be alright. The pills work. I must be okay. What is the alternative?

Everyone has faith in me to survive. I ask God for help as everyone was slowly stripped away from me by death.

There is only me and God to wrestle this archenemy depression. The anger that sits inside me threatens. Every day, we win if I get up. Again and again.

To choose generosity, to be a good person, to see beauty, to love. There is no good inside me unless God resides there. That’s my life. That’s enough for today.

If Anyone

If anyone was likely

To die early, it was me.

The black dog brought me close

More than once. But she’s gone and I

Must live, a mother who lives

Forever.

Grief

Grief has no kind of timeline.

It follows strange pathways through my body. I’m tired of feeling it.

I had the thought two days ago, I want to forget her. I will gather all the things in my home that remind me of her. I will box them up and make them disappear from sight. Memories only lead to grief when your someone is murdered.

My phone rings from a good friend of thirty years.

We never talk talk. Just catch up via social media.

It triggered the same panic that I get every time the phone rings, someone is dead. I answered it. Of course no one is dead. We had a lovely conversation filled with laughter and her voice just exactly the way I remember.

I still fear answering my phone. I get a jolt of adrenaline and panic.

I’m tired of my grief. I am choosing life, I promise you. But grief just comes ambling in and you are stricken by lightening. You choose to regroup, get on with whatever it is you were doing, or curl into a singed ball.

I hear a certain performer and remember she loved going to concerts with her kids. I see a certain flower and remember her love of tulips. I smell a food and think of her cooking. I cook and the kitchen is messy, I think of how messy she was. I unlock my car and think of how she broke my lock and how furious I felt. I drive her son to football and know that she would have been a great sports Mom.

Forty something years of memories that cannot be boxed up and made to go away. Though I am tired of my grief I carry on.

heartache

Heartache.

What an inadequate expression of pain. Generational heartache is heavy, and physical, a sagging weight on your chest. That is what my heart felt like yesterday. Holidays hurt and I am left trying to figure out why.

Yes, I miss my mom and sister, but more so I miss the traditions that my father relentlessly enforced. It is complicated. Growing up I felt controlled by his insistence that we all share all holiday meals together. Those traditions were important to him. I never asked him why just resisted being controlled. But he had no mercy, not for other plans or other people in our lives. Bring them along he always insisted. And now I long for them like an abused child longs for the love of their abusive parent.

On Easter we gathered and living in Texas we got new outfits for church, we ate lamb with mint sauce.

He made us gather.

And now, the lack of tradition creates a crater inside me. I am so averse to being controlling, that we don’t do it at all. I don’t want to insist and I don’t want the hurt of family choosing to be elsewhere. And to labor over a giant meal like my mother always did, only to have family eat and disperse as quickly as possible seems like too risky. Why do I protect my heart at all costs? Or perhaps I’m simply too lazy and I do not want to do the work.

And it is work. It was easy for my father to insist when he wasn’t the one spending all day or days in the kitchen.

I don’t want to become my father a dictator of tradition. I don’t want to become my mother a slave to tradition.

I am left with a hole so cavernous I can hear the wind blowing, whirling, and lashing. I was physically ill for days thinking about it all, so complicated, so twisted, and so hard to understand.

I am broken by my upbringing and unable for whatever reason to create our own traditions. It is too painful to be rejected and that is why I think my father just made us. As crazy as that sounds, perhaps I get it now.

I know I do not want to be that person. Fifty-four and both parents dead and I am still trying to figure myself out.

hello my friends

Back at therapy. Been doing this since my twenties. Does anyone else get therapy fatigue? Back with my Psychiatrist.

I’ve lost myself. I always blame the medication. Because I just really want to cry. I have tears inside. I am drowning inside me.

With the antidepressants, I struggle to feel. So we’re trying to figure out what’s next.

Being more empathic than your typical person is exhausting. Even without the ability right now to feel my own, and at my current level of medication I should not care about anyone around me. But I do. My heart is breaking everywhere and all the time. But I have no internal emotional life. I am hard and soft at the same time.

This is not profound. But it is difficult.

But, I took a leave from work in November. Doctors are telling me that I have all the signs of severe physical exhaustion, stress, my brain is wounded and tired. I have had memory loss, frequent tension headaches, and fatigue. I thought three months should help me find myself again.

This was naïve.

What I discovered is that I am doing for others everywhere and myself nowhere.

There are needs everywhere in my life. And that is perfectly alright. As we’ve been given a lot to handle; my own depression, anxiety and sobriety, one child’s mental illnesses, my mother’s dementia and kidney failure, buying our business which we brought back to thriving, my best friend and sister Holly’s murder, my mother’s death five months later, and the stress surrounding the murder and taking care of Holly’s children.

I lost myself. Eventually the body, brain and heart called it quits. Sputters to a stop. Demands a time out. Shuts down.

I am happy to not be depressed. Not right now, thankfully. But I do not control my depression. I only know how to keep it at bay. It doesn’t always work. I have no magic tricks.

I am praying for some kind of relief. That one day life will ease up and I will find my passions again. For life, the writing and photography. More than today.

Today it is good enough to go to work, organize our family of seven’s appointments, show up on time for football practice pick up, keep my head down and avoid most people.

It is not that I don’t (double negative sorry) love people. I do.

I am simply not myself.

Violence and Mental Illness

As many of you know, we have mental illness in our family lineage. The details don’t matter in this case, I think. But it is important for people who know nothing about it to know that mental illness can be in any family and violence is not directly correlated with it. Despair and lack of hope, maybe. Many things come together, mental health being just one of them, to create a situation where a person does a violent act.

My brother in law was a mostly gentle person in my experience. Of course I wasn’t married to him and my sister is gone, but from our lived experiences I believe she would agree. Verbal abuse is something that did occur which was painful to be a child in their household. But my sister struggled with verbal anger too, a legacy from my father.

We were verbally abused most of our lives into adulthood up until his death.

When we asked Holly if she was comfortable with Paul having a gun in their home, she said she was because he kept it in a safe. I am sure she was thinking a child wouldn’t stumble on it, don’t we all think that about guns at home? Keep them away from the kids. She was offered a restraining order during the divorce which she declined. She did not believe he was violent in that way.

But he murdered her. He took his gun, did some target practice (we didn’t know this until afterward from the police), tricked his way into Holly’s home, laid in wait upstairs and then killed her.

I have many sleepless nights thinking about that. Of course, we could have said something. We just listened, when more than a year before her murder when she told us about the gun. Paul was not a violent person. It was shocking to us that he thought he needed a gun in a suburban neighborhood of Seattle. But we just listened. At that point I didn’t know my brother in law very well. He was depressed for many years through out their seventeen years of marriage. A few times I tried to help.

“There’s no shame in seeking help. Antidepressants do change you. They don’t feel good. I am struggling with that myself, for much of my adult life. I don’t like how they make me unable to feel much. But they also help me out of the passive suicidality of major depression.”

Our situation is unique. But aren’t they all and I suppose that’s my point. The people that are out there killing, who have mental illness of some sort in their history, are unique humans. Their upbringing, their financial situation, their lack of healthy relationships, their solitude, their access to mental health support, joblessness, access to medicine, therapy, doctors all create a moment of time where anything is possible. And being poor, to get help almost impossible to resolve.

It is more difficult to get mental health support in this country than to buy a gun.

Psychology Today

Mental health support needs to be continuous, it is very dependant on the person’s access to help as well as all the things I listed above.

For many years we fought the system to get our daughter help and when we in our most despondent, when all we could think of was to take her to the ER, we were told she has to be a direct threat to herself (actively suicidal) or to others. Do you know how hard that is to prove? Much less wanting to declare that about your loved one.

Mental health and violence to yourself or others is an impenetrable labyrinth.

Hey, How are You? My Sister is Dead.

My sister’s murder shut me down, I have had to close off the pain. It is the only way to keep going. And go we must. It is not like I don’t want to go on. Life holds plenty of goodness. But living in a world where a husband can kill a wife with a gun, well, that is unimaginable to me. I have spend many, many hours thinking about how to go on.

We must not only imagine it, we must live it.

With all the killings this week, I have to admit, I’m shook up. There are so many hard memories that I have put away in a safe box and the news takes that box and shakes it hard. Pain comes flying out at the most unexpected and inconvenient moments.

And then things that shouldn’t be hard, become hard. “I chose the number 73 on my football jersey because it is the year mom was born.”

“What a wonderful way to remember her,” I say with my heart crackling like it is on fire and my head spinning.

We are coming up on three years, in June. Three years later it is still a hard lump in my throat and I find myself avoiding conversation with everyone today because I don’t want to answer “How are you?” People just mean “hey” or “how was your night?” and I want to say “My face is burning hot right now, to be honest, because I just remembered my sister is dead and I don’t want to talk to you right now.”

But I won’t be rude. “Hey back,” I’ll reply, “Great Bucks game last night.”