Month: February 2018

It’s true. My brain loves me.
 
And at its very core, the responsibility of my brain is to keep me alive.
 
I try to distract it by remembering the words to every single Neil Diamond song. But my brain has more important things to do. It keeps my heart beating, my pancreas processing glucose, my eyes seeing the word, my temp at a 98.5.
 
My brain loves me.
 
It also loves routine and muscle memory. My brain tells my foot to step on the brake when it sees a red light. In my sleepy state, my brain tells my index finger where the snooze button is. It tells my voice to say hello when answering a phone.
 
47 years of this life, my brain and I are pretty connected.
 
I like to think of how my brain would react when tested. How it would process the perfect snarky comment, the best response in a meeting, the perfect reaction when being flipped off on I-25. But so many times this brain I love and that loves me lets me down. Maybe it’s caught off guard; it didn’t anticipate a middle finger in the exit lane or that really tough question in a meeting. My brain likes routine.
 
There is nothing routine about a traumatic situation. Our brain hates it. The amygdala hijacks all rational thought. We search for something routine, something we can relate to; in a traumatic situation, there is nothing. Our brain, whose purpose is to love us and keep that heart beating, makes decisions we would not usually make, we rage, we puke, we freeze, we faint.
 
Our brave, our first responders, our doctors, nurses, our military, spend their lives training to respond in these very worst situations. And sometimes even their brain has no place for a trauma. With Samantha, our interactions with medical teams involved input from us. Their brain needed a place to process and trauma offers no chance to process.
 
My point….and I do have one…..is that if your brain is lucky enough to not have a history of processing trauma, assuming heroic actions from your brain that loves you and just wants to protect you is silly. And disrespectful to your brain….your brain that loves you so.

I have so much to do tonight…..so many productive, society enhancing projects and instead I found myself in a gun debate.

F$CK!

I gotta tell you, these shootings make me crazy; sad, mad, frustrated. And I keep thinking…..just walk away. Walk away.

But I can’t.

I fought so hard for a life. And so many others fought for her life too.

This taking of lives is so far beyond me.

The crater that person leaves, the lives that have been blown up. I cannot put my head around why anyone would want to create such destruction and why it keeps happening more and more often.

As a society, it is hard to comprehend the impact these loses have over time.

It sucks to lose a child.

I cannot tell you how much it sucks.

The first week you wonder how your eyes can generate so many tears. You think you are all dried up but they come again- in flooding waters. You think your eyes might wash out of your head.

And you get through weird things. Things that are so awful there is no dialogue in your brain to process it. How do you process your child’s funeral?

“What music do you want played?”

“What the holy hell? How the f*ck am I supposed to answer that god awful question?”

But you come up with an answer. And it is brilliant. Because everyone is looking at your flood-water eyes for an answer.
 
And you think “okay. I might be okay.”

But you are not. You are so not.

You get a freezer full of lasagna.

You hate that lasagna. It will stay in your freezer for years. Stupid, grief lasagna. Dropped off at your door with the very best intentions.

You congratulate yourself for putting on pants.

You forget to brush you teeth.

You think you are in hell. You wish you were in hell.

Someone tells you that you need to brush your teeth.

Two weeks later real grief sets in. A grief so powerful you feel like you are in the movie Alien and that stupid monster will push through your chest. Maybe it will and that will be it.

But no, it just pushes It is sickening. Heartbreaking. Physically painful.

You walk into her room. It smells like her. You take a dress a breathe that smell until your lungs cant hold any more. It is the very best smell in the entire world

My God. Can this be bottled?

A year goes by and you congratulate yourself on a year. But then the truth sets in. This is your life. You will forever live this life without this person. And sometimes that reality is too much.

The alien subsides but is still there….pushing at times. And sometimes you are hopelessly sad.

People wonder if you will move on.

You will never move on. You lose friends. You embrace those who allow you to ugly cry and howl like a lone wolf.

More time goes by and you still drive to work and cry for no reason. That all becomes okay because this is your new normal.

Your life is now on the outskirts. You are that person who lost a child. You choose to engage when you can but find at times that the triteness of life is sometimes too much and you need to retreat.

You will always miss.

Always.

And there is nothing anyone can do about it- nothing anyone can change.

But we need to change.

We need to change.

It sucks to lose a child.