Fear of Sleeping and a Taste of Pain

I had intended to write regularly this summer. After all, my tasks were light. All I had to do was take my mom to treatments and help her out. But cancer consumed my summer, and then it consumed my mom.

I don't want to go to sleep at night. I don't want to get up in the morning. Tonight I fell into a rampage of sobbing, with my best friend patting me and holding my hand. Then he got me kleenex for my nose and a cool washcloth for my face.

I don't usually cry when someone dies, not much. I'm usually the strong one. When my dad died, I felt I had to be strong for my mom --- who was destroyed --- and my brother --- who was young. When my brother died at 18, I had to be strong for a host of people who were leaking tears and acting distraught; no one asked me if I needed any comfort.

There is no one to be strong for now but me. No one who depends on me for comfort.

No one who will be my anchor when I wander in the void. I feel as if gravity has given way and I don't know how to find my way home, or if I have a home to find a way to.


It's been three days since my mom died and I have seen an attorney and a realtor. I have had two step-sisters and a step-brother-in-law come and go, leaving beyond boxes and partial organization in their wake; I have an aunt who remains and is going thru my grandmother's things, a task she was going to perform with my mom; and I have a best friend who is on call for many people, which is why he is going back home (he says he will return). In some ways, I don't want any of them. I feel as if I want to wrap a soft blanket around me and sit on the couch and be nothing for some unplanned period of time.

I truly feel lost. I don't know what to do with myself.

Food doesn't taste very good, not even ice cream. My body hurts and I have become ill. I feel like I'm being lazy, letting everyone else go thru things, or that they are perceiving me as lazy. And I'm afraid of not keeping track of what is going on around me. I certainly have little memory of Sunday and Monday and it's still spotty after that.

I'd rage at the unfairness of it: I've lost father, brother, and mother, and I have no husband or children. I am estranged from all the rest of my family. Losing Mom set me loose in what feels like a black, cold, and hostile sea. Yes, I'd cry that it is unfair, but I know completely that life is neither fair nor unfair. There is no guiding power, because why would I be so important that I would be taught a lesson by the death of someone else. Seems wasteful, and makes me seem more important than the one(s) who died. I will gut the next person who says "well, her purpose in life has been fulfilled." As if she were a kleenex to be tossed in the trash once the Ultimate Power had blown its nose in her.

I know all about grief: I've had lots of practice. But I've never been left so alone. Yes, I have some good friends, some of them much like family, but no one who is mine. I feel rather superfluous to their lives. Like I'm just a stray kleenex from an old box, and they have plenty of kleenex already. And some hankies, too.

I need to invest in some more kleenex, and maybe some hankies. My crying isn't over yet. That's the only thing about my life now that I am sure about.