Fake It Until You Make It...And All That Crap

I’m not sure what this post is to be about.  I have not started a post this aimlessly before.  To do so seems . . . frightening . . . pointless . . . rambling.  But, I have been really quiet the past couple weeks about where I am at in this grief process.  Quiet makes people more comfortable.  Makes me easier to talk to.  Yet it is not real.  My body can feel how incongruent it is.  Inauthentic.  This is not me.  I am honest to a fault.  When I stop being honest, I stop being me.  When I stop being me, I don’t know who I am.  I walk around feeling nauseated and I can’t quite pinpoint the source.  I just keep swallowing back the bitter taste in the back of my mouth and wondering what I ate.  But it isn’t anything I ate.  It is the holding back of what is.  The swallowing of my sincerity.  So, tonight, I write.  I write without plan, but not without purpose.  The purpose is, letting it out so I can stop feeling like I might puke at any moment.

I have been trying to be a good robot.  I have been consciously trying to complain less.  I have been trying to put a positive spin on things more.  I have been reaching out to others, starting and rekindling friendships, arranging lunches, and writing letters and emails, with more effort than I have put into a social life than ever before.  I try to remember what is going on in people’s lives and to ask about it.  This is something that came more naturally before, but has taken real effort since Ron’s cancer.  It is hard for me to care about anything . . . about myself or about anyone else . . . but I am trying. 

I think my efforts are working.  I am feeling more liked.  I am feeling like if I wanted to do something or be social, I would have people to call.  Most of the time, I don’t feel like even talking on the phone, let alone going out to actually see someone, but if I wanted to, I could.  This feels good.

Yet, when I am sobbing and completely depressed, I don’t feel like I have anyone to call.  I don’t want to disappoint anyone.  I don’t want to show anyone how little progress forward I have actually made.  I don’t want people to know how truly, deeply sad I still am.  I know this is silly.  I know people who read this will reach out and tell me I can always call them when I feel bad.  But I also know that I won’t.  I am deeply embedded in this new cycle where I want to appear like I am doing better, in part because I feel like if I pretend to do better, maybe I really will do better.  Fake it until you make it, and all that crap.

All of this takes so much energy.  I am exhausted.  My job has become a major source of stress that I do not know if I can deal with.  Three people from my 10 person team have left since August and more are on their way out.  There are new hires, and they are wonderful additions, but it is hard to have so many new people all at once.  It means more responsibility on those left behind, at least until all the new folks are trained and up and running.  But some of the replacements have not yet been hired, let alone trained and proficient at what we do.  There is a long gap between someone leaving and that happening.  The gap is going to be very large for a long time to come, since we do not have an easy job to learn.  I have more on my plate at work than I can accomplish, yet I cannot complain about it, for there is no one else who can share the burden.  And it will just get worse, at least for several more months.  Pair that with overwhelming duties and decisions to make about my home.  And stir in the grief and emotional struggles I am facing.  It is not a good mix.  I am not sure what to do about it.  I am not supposed to be making major decisions so soon after such a major loss, yet I feel faced with the need to figure things out or lose myself very quickly.

One night this week, I forgot the book in which I write to Ron.  I left it at work.  I couldn’t write him.  The next night, I had the final session of my grief support group, in which I let some of my stress and anger and sadness out.  I was worn out after that and was staying at Dustin & Carrie’s that night and I just got too tired to write.  The next night, I also put off writing.  I did the same yesterday, Saturday, even though I had all day and all night to write.  I found chores to do instead.  I created a list of chores I did not accomplish in a day and probably would not accomplish in a week, even if I weren’t working full time.  I told myself I could write when the chores were done.  I did not write.  This morning I wrote to Ron.  I caught him up on what had happened in the 110 hours that lapsed between entries. 

It is not that Ron would mind the lapse, if some version of spirit Ron has any inkling that I am writing to him.  He would not mind, especially if I were out living life to the fullest and having fun.  He would never want me to feel obligated.  Still, something feels weird in my taking this long pause in writing to him.  It did not feel like it was a conscious or healthy decision on my part.  It felt like I was procrastinating.  Avoiding.  Why?

In the past, my Ron Projects have given me some comfort.  I have several going that are going to take a long time.  One of them is converting his blog into a book.  Recently, when working on this, I have been filled with a sense of joy and peace.  I read Ron’s voice in his writing and it is like he is still with me.  I feel so grateful for his outlook on things.  So grateful he shared that with everyone.  Even more grateful that I was lucky enough to have him share more with me than he did with anyone else.  Luckiest.  Girl.  Ever.  That is how I usually feel when working on any of the Ron Projects.

Today, I attempted to work on the blog project.  I could not even get the first entry I had to work on completed.  I wanted to find a picture that I knew he snapped of this sunrise he was mentioning in the blog.  I had to look on his old Netbook to find it.  This led to me looking at lots of pictures he took.  The world through Ron’s eyes.  My desire to share it all.  Looking at the things he found interesting or funny.  Marveling at how almost every picture he ever took of me is somehow unflattering and hilarious, wondering to myself, ‘if this is how he saw me, how could he possibly have loved me?’ yet knowing that he did, in fact, love me.  Still, I did all this looking and realized I did not have the energy to shift from the emotional state this left me in to my logical, technological brain to transfer files from computer to computer.  I just didn’t have it in me. 

So, I thought I would just read his blog for a bit instead as a way to feel close to him.  I read and I did feel close.  I could remember exactly the moments he described.  I felt pride as he praised my egg-scrambling abilities.  I felt gratitude as he talked about my brother picking him and his groceries up when his Toyota’s water pump died.  I felt a strange, wistful nostalgia for those trips when I would take him to Ann Arbor and advocate for him and spend the whole day going from appointment to appointment at University of Michigan.  Yet none of these feelings made me feel better today, like they have in the past.  They just made me feel worse.  More alone.  Left with the realization that this is all I have. 

I was loved once.  Wholly.  Hugely.  Unabashedly. 

I loved once.  Fiercely.  Totally.  Joyfully.

I am still in love.  I do not know if I can still be loved by someone who no longer walks the earth.  I like to think so, but I don’t know.  How can we ever know?  And whether I am or am not, I am alone in this life.  I am alone in my house.  I am alone with the decisions I have to make about work and whether to invest in repairs that are needed at my home and whether to refinance to get the title just in my name and whether to try to sell it again.  I am alone when I go to sleep and when I wake up.  Whether I sing in the shower or sob silently.  Whether I put effort into getting dressed or throw on whatever article of clothing my hand first touches.  There is no one who sees me for me anymore.  I don’t even see myself.  I look in the mirror and I truly have no idea who the person is looking back at me.  I don’t see myself in my eyes or my chin or even my hair.  I am a ghost of a person who was once loved.

I know there are many other people who are alone.  I don’t mean to whine or act like this is something totally unique to me.  But there is a difference in being single and in being widowed.  I cannot explain it except to say this aloneness is more than just being alone.  It is the feeling of being left behind.  Abandoned, even when the person leaving you didn’t want to leave you. 

I realized, tonight, after writing to catch Ron back up on my life and after reading what he has left written for all of us, that I have been avoiding these activities because they are as much a way to stay connected to him as they are proof of his absence.  Proof of the fact that I cannot ask him what he thinks about something or share a joke with him or converse about a beautiful moment one of us experienced.  There are no more two-way conversations.  There is me writing to him.  There is me reading what he already wrote.  That is all there is.

I have been making fires this week in the woodstove.  I still enjoy the cozy effect, but the process of making the fire - chopping and hauling wood up to the house, skillfully setting-up the kindling, blowing to get the coals hot, tending it every half hour or so – the process is so much more tedious now that I am making it just for me rather than making it for Ron, to keep his precious, small body warm against the cold, dark nights that we fought against in those two winters that we battled his illness.

By tomorrow, I will have put my functioning work face back on.  I won’t be talking about this stuff with anyone.  You won’t even know it is inside me.  I don’t even know it is inside me most of the time.  Lately, I run from one thing to the next and I perform as well under pressure as I ever have (or at least pretty close, I would say).  I avoid and I procrastinate about getting really real because I am so stressed out that I have no room to feel the things buried in my heart and my psyche.  But if I am honest, I am still hurting terribly.  I am still as shocked today as I was the first day when I realized Ron was gone.  This does not become less baffling to me. 

A world without Ron Clark is a sad world indeed.  I miss his laughter.  I miss his hugs.  I miss his insight.  I miss his humor.  I miss his cooking.  I miss his compassion.  I miss his optimism.  I miss his stubbornness.  I miss his desire to learn and try every new hobby.  I even miss his messes . . . I would give anything to come home from work to find an array of eating and drinking utensils and dirty socks and various scraps of paper with strange pass codes written on them and candy wrappers and technological devices surrounding the love of my life in a little nest wherever he had sprawled out for the day.  Anything . . . I would give anything.