Pain

(Be warned: this is not a happy post. I just think that writing about this will help me cope.)

I barely slept last night. The pain most often hits me at night. It’s not physical pain. It’s emotional pain. It’s contagious, too, as Marc had to spend some time comforting me and sharing the agony.

This is a cruel world. Sometimes I wonder if the greatest joys in life could hold up against the pure pain life sometimes brings.

It has been almost eleven months since my Mom and grandmother died, sixteen days apart. It took me years to come to grips with my Dad’s death (he died in 1998), but 2004 brought pain that I just can’t reconcile. The loss of my Mom was the ultimate blow, but I loved my grandmother, too, and the two deaths in the space of a few weeks was a staggering one-two punch.

Friends and family recently wished me a happy new year. Well, it can hardly be worse than 2004. I sure hope for it to be much better.

What keeps me up at night? The loss of my loved ones? Yes, that’s certainly part of it. I miss them, my Mom especially, and I am selfish—I want them back! What’s worse than the losses are the visions.

Not “visions” in the sense of seeing things that may or may not exist. What I mean is mental pictures of people I love more than words can say suffering with horrible diseases. It’s bad enough to lose the ones you love, but having seen them slowly suffer as their time on this earth drew to a close is what really haunts me.

I have a lifetime of wonderful memories of my Mom that I can cherish. So what comes to me late at night, as I lie in bed unable to sleep? I see that most wonderful lady lying in a hospital bed, only able to tolerate the pain because of a morphine IV; I remember with great clarity how the cancer she had battled for years suddenly (or so it seemed—the oncologist may have been keeping us in the dark as to the true progress) rushed up and took her life, robbing her of the ability to communicate before she could even grasp how it had taken such a bad turn. I remember the agony of her trying to talk to me, of my leaning in trying to hear her whisper over the noise of the medical equipment, feeling I had failed her when I couldn’t make out the words. What if it was something she really needed to say?

I cope with life’s hardships with humor. I like good comedy, and I personally am a perennial smartass and kidder. Remember the song, Tears of a Clown? Okay, I’m not a clown, but a lot of humor is hiding pain. My pain runs too deep to keep buried. I just don’t know how to get all of the pain out.

The icing on the cake is that I never know when something will bring the pain right to the surface. For example, a few days ago, Marc and I were watching TV when I landed on an episode of South Park. It was a silly (aren’t they all?) sort of Christmas episode. Part of the plot involved the death of a mountain lion. That saddened me enough, but when her cubs came out of the cave to find that their mother was dead, I started crying. Now, this was a cartoon animal; a cartoon animal in South Park. Not exactly connected to real life. Even so, I was crying.

When South Park made me cry, Marc tried to comfort me. “Honey, it’s just a cartoon.” I’m an animal lover and hurt for any animal I see hurt or killed—a road-kill squirrel makes me sad. That, however, is not what drove this. I have a huge reserve of emotional pain, and the idea of a mother (even a cartoon animal mother) dying was all it took for the tears to start. In a way, that’s good—crying helps me get the pain out. The ridiculous part is that I usually can’t cry. I feel like I could use to do lots of crying, but I usually can’t make it happen.

I wish I could make the pain go away. I want to remember the many years of good memories. I’m sure that day will come, but it may be a long way off. Until then, I may suffer through a lot of sleepless nights. Why must life be so hard?