In my professional life as a software application architect I spend a lot of time looking at and understanding process. How does the client work today? How do they want to work tomorrow? What processes exist to help or hinder them? So it shouldn’t be surprising that I look for processes in my personal life. Obviously the largest process I’m moving through currently is the so-called grief process.
Most of us have heard of the “stages of grief” and can probably name at least two of the stages. However, I suspect that very few know that the currently accepted stages of grief mutated from an article called “The 5 Stages of Receiving Catastrophic News” written by Elsabeth Kubler-Ross in her book, “On Death and Dying”, Macmillan Publishing Company, 1969. She presented the 5 stages terminally ill patients go through upon learning of their terminal illness. Over the years since 1969 health care professionals, nurses, clergy, students, mental heath professionals, and readers of the original work somehow mutated the stages into the 5 Stages of Grief. (source: “Beware the Five Stages of Grief”)
A better title would be The 5 Stages of Coping With Trauma. Better still is an entirely new mantra: TEAR.
T = To accept the reality of loss E = Experience the pain of loss A = Adjust to the new environment without the lost object R = Reinvest in the new reality
TEAR represents the actual grief work that happens once a person has moved through the 5 Stages of Coping with Trauma. To me this process makes sense. The original 5 stages, regardless of what you call them, represent the impact the trauma has on the individual immediately following the event. Once a person has moved sufficiently away from the trauma event then they start to (hopefully) process the grief through TEAR.
I experienced a brief period of denial. Having dealt with Michele’s health issues for some time, and watching her have two near death experiences in her final days prepared me in some perverse way for her death. I am experiencing a longer period of anger. Not continuous anger, but minor eruptions surrounding events removed from her death; places where it feels safe to express anger. For example, I can be anger about slow traffic on the way home because that is a small thing. Trying to express all my anger about losing Michele is a very large thing and too overwhelming to attempt.
I only briefly experience bargaining, usually when I break down emotionally and express the pain I feel through tears. Depression, the fourth stage, is not as constant as you might suspect. I am certainly depressed, and I have periods of time where that depression is almost crushing. But I also have periods of time where I don’t feel crushed, and where I almost feel normal. I don’t think I’ve reached acceptance fully. Intellectually I have accepted what has happened and what is happening, but emotionally I am still reeling from Michele’s death.
In terms of TEAR, I feel I have started to accept the reality of loss, and I am certainly experiencing the pain of that loss. I think that adjusting to my environment without Michele will take a long time to complete. And I can say with certainty that I am not ready to invest in the new reality. Buying into that new reality means letting go of the old one. It means, in a way, letting go of Michele. I know from my grief work about Amy that letting go doesn’t mean losing the person, it merely means unclenching so that you can experience all of your memories and emotions about them and not just those that are figure in the moment.
Reading the Beware the Five Stages of Grief" article has given my intellect a process that makes sense, and a roadmap of sorts to gauge my movement through the aftermath of this trauma. Having a process I understand and agree with gives me a sense of control I didn’t have before. Whether you espouse the 5 stages of grief or TEAR, the feeling of lost control underlies everything you do and, unchecked, that feeling will only exacerbate the anger, depression, fear, et cetera you are already feeling.
Over the weekend I visited the body shop recommended by Lexus and received an estimate to repair the front bumper. As it turns out, the bracket that holds the destroyed fog lamp in place is part of the bumper, and since it was snapped off in the accident, there is no way to replace just the light.
Actually the bumper is only a few dollars more expensive than the light assembly. The lamp is 217.52 and the bumper another 254.98. Toss in some paint (bumpers are white and have to be painted), and labor to disassemble and reassemble the car and you are looking at $984.75. All for one paperback book sized hunk of cement.
The insurance company is picking up the tab for 2-days of car rental, so after I pay my $500 deductable, their total will be $544. Happy happy.
Efficiency is not your friend. At least not when you have an entire day to fill and you are depressed. In the three hours since I’ve been up I have:
Now what? I’ve got 12, maybe 13, hours to kill before I can reasonably go to bed. Maybe a movie, that’d kill 2 or 3 hours. More if I picked a theater that was farther away. I went window shopping at the book store last evening. I could repeat that at the electronics store today.
At least tomorrow I’ve got 9 or 10 hours of work to fill the time.
In order here are the “meals” I had today.
Breakfast Three-egg folded omelet
Lunch Dublin Coddle (Irish potato and sausage soup)
Supper Chips and salsa (following a couple of hours of indecision) bowl of Frosted Flakes
The plan tomorrow is to make chili. Or maybe huddle in the corner, rocking back and forth muttering to myself.
Today has been filled with a hollow rushing noise in the space of my heart that Michele filled. I have felt disconnected and apart from everything going on around me, almost as if it was happening to someone else. Michele and I both loved turkey and the ritual of having roasted turkey for dinner. Not being able to fulfill that ritual this year is very hard. Every day is hard, but some days are more poignant than others.
Even as I struggle to deal with the heightened sense of loss this evening I am painfully aware that her birthday and Christmas are bearing down on me like a run away freight train. There is nothing I can do to prepare myself for those events and no way to stop them from occurring. I thought that spending today with friends and their family would make it better, and while it filled the moments, it served more as a painful reminder that they all had something I could not - a loved one to share the day with.
Looking ahead to Christmas I am now strongly leaning towards spending that weekend by myself. I want to be free to do what ever I need, to express whatever is in my heart in the moment without reservation or fear of judgement. Whether others feel this way towards me or not, I feel stigmatized now. I feel as if I alter the setting for any gathering just by my presence. So I end up trying to fade into the woodwork or join in as if I am not screaming on the inside. I end up taking care of my perception of their needs rather than meeting my own.
So for Christmas I want to be by myself. I want to bake Michele one last birthday cake, and make a casserole of beanie weenies with mustard and brown sugar. I want to sing her happy birthday. And I want to bawl my eyes out. Christmas morning I want to watch our favorite holiday movies and eat too many chocolate cookies with eggnog.
What I have come to realize today is that saying good bye to a beloved partner happens over and over again. The annual touchstones that made up your year together are each cause for fresh sorrow and each deserve their own measure of grief. On this Thanksgiving day I am grateful for having share an incredible love affair with Michele. I am also thankful for coming to a new understand about how I need to care for myself as I make way way around our sun for the first time alone.
The problem with doing laundry at home is that it is a single threaded process, that only moves as fast as the dryer dries. I had four loads to complete this evening: work clothes, sweats and tee-shirts, whites, and towels. I started when I got home at 5:00. It is now 9:25 and the THIRD load (the whites) is still in the dryer. Luckily the towels can stay in the dryer until tomorrow after they finish. At least the rest of my life (such as it is) goes on in the background at home. I can eat dinner, watch Tivo, use the computer, et cetera.
Laundromats, on the other hand let you multi-thread your laundry. Use as many washers or dryers simultaneously as you want/need. Of course there your life is single threaded as you are stuck in a hot, smelly place that you’d rather not visit if you had a choice
At home you get to use the quarters for something else too.
Over the weekend I installed Mac OS X release 10.4 on my two Macintoshes. Overall the experience was a good one. Apple includes a nice “archive and install” option that makes a copy of the current OS installation just in case. Selecting this option also enables the more important, in my estimation, “preserve users and network settings” option. Which does exactly what it claims to do: preserves your home directory.
When we updated from 10.2.x to 10.3 I made good use of the preserve option on both machines. The only lost data was my fault. I have lots of open source software that I use for J2EE Web application development, and it all lives in the “/usr/local” directory on my machine. Naturally, “preserve users” isn’t setup to backup this directory, and I wasn’t paying close enough attention in my haste to upgrade. So I lost all the packages temporarily until they could be downloaded and installed again. The only real damage was to my ego.
As I recently upgraded my hard drive, and installed the original into a FireWire/USB enclosure, I thought that this upgrade would go very smoothly, without even losing the /usr/local directory tree. The funny thing about having a backup device is that now your focus shifts slightly. Without a backup you kind of ignore the potential to lose your entire digital life, damn the backups, full speed ahead!
With a backup potential at hand you suddenly face the possibility that you’ll lose all your data and that the backup had better be good. And that the restore process had better work as well. Adding to the pressure was my very real awareness that the documents on Michele’s computer were now truly irreplaceable.
However, as I said at the start, the experience was a good one. Both installs worked with out a hitch. And restoring my development libraries worked flawlessly as well. So now both computers are
Tiger, tiger burning bright, In the forests of the night…
“How are you doing?”
This is the rudest, most insensitive, least caring, worst way to engage with some one. Ever. In the history of the world. I hate this question. Hearing it directed at me induces a rage that I can barely contain. The next asshole who asks me, “how are you doing?”, I’m going to hit so hard their family will feel it.
When we lived in Illinois the half bath off the kitchen had pithy sayings on it. One of them was: (more or less) “Don’t tell them about your indigestion, ‘How are you’ is a greeting, not a question.” And therein lies the problem. We have isolated ourselves from everyone else to the point where we want to avoid any connection with another human being, even when we just inquired about them. Pundits would have you believe that the Internet is isolating people. I say that western society (I am using the term ‘society’ very loosely here) started isolating people with the birth of the idea that we shouldn’t expose our emotional knickers to any one for any reason.
Several times in the past 41 days (yes, I am counting them. Want to know the hours?) people have asked me, “How are you doing?”, only to get blasted in return.
“How are you doing?” “I’m fucking miserable. That’s how. i fly into rages for no apparent reason. I cry so hard and so long that I throw up. I can’t sleep with out taking drugs. Food tastes like shit, and that’s only when I can force myself to fix it. I can’t focus on anything for more than about 12 seconds. And I can’t make any of the pain I have go away. Fuck you very much for asking.”
I can see the scared, “oh shit” look in their eyes. I know that all they wanted to do was fill their assigned role in society as the “concerned friend” by asking. They didn’t really want to know, they can’t handle that someone in their midst is so beyond their reckoning so they just want to follow the pro-forma script and get on with their existence. Well I can’t get on with my existence until I fully express how I feel. And if I do that in a way that upsets you, well boo-hoo. The absolute WORST part about this, beyond the obvious, is having to take care of other people and their reactions to Michele’s suicide.
In the few moments of lucidity I’ve had since October 10th I understand that her death, and the manner of her death, is having a huge impact on everyone I know and everyone she knew. Not everyone can handle something this in-your-face real. I am perfectly willing to give those people who will respond in kind a place to sort through their stuff. But those people who just want to anguish over her death, and who want to “fix” me, those people I have no time, patience, or compassion for.
Instead of, “how are you doing,” which indicates to me that you haven’t even really thought about me, why not take two seconds and observe where I am in that moment and base your inquiry on that? For example,
“Gee, you look really down today. Would you like to go someplace private and talk - I’m in a good space to listen.”
“Wow, it’s great to see you smile. I can’t imagine how you manage to smile at anything right now.”
“Hey, I was thinking about you, wanted to let you know that you can share with me anything you want.”
Or if you can’t even bring yourself to figure out how to engage on a real level then just say, “Hey” or “Hi” and move on.
If you live in a large city sooner or later you will see a construction dump truck, or cement mixer, rolling down the road or highway in front of you. They all have the same legend painted on the back:
NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR DAMAGE - STAY BACK 500 FEET
The idea is, by painting this warning (usually too small to read clearly until you are well within the 500 foot limit) the company and operator of the vehicle is not responsible for bits of rock, debris, concrete, et cetera, that fall off the truck and damage your vehicle.
Actually I think what they mean to say is “We won’t be held liable, under any circumstance, for damages caused to your vehicle by the improper operation of ours. Because we painted this sign on our truck, we can now act like irresponsible children and get away with it.”
And no matter what they paint on the truck, they are responsible. They didn’t properly clean all the cement off the equipment in the back. They were driving 20 miles an hour slower than the flow of traffic, causing a mini-traffic jam behind them as people tried to go around. They dropped a Danielle Steel novel-sized chuck of concrete on the interstate in front of my car.
With traffic on both sides of me, and some cretin tailgating me from behind I did the best I could to not precipitate a three or four car pileup and still miss the bounding hunk of rock headed towards my car. The passenger side of the front bumper is cracked and the fog/drivng light assembly has been knocked back into the cavity behind its normal position. I’ll have to go get an estimate this week, but I expect it’ll be at least a $1000, maybe $1500 as the bumper is all one piece, and the whole freaking thing will have to be replaced.
Not responsible for damage? I don’t think so. You are so totally responsible for the damage. I am going to release you from any debt though. I don’t want karma with you. I just hope that you contract a virulent strain of leprosy and rot for the rest of your life.
My frustration level is at an all time high these days. The slightest wrinkles in my plans leave me seething with anger. I know that the root cause is the loss of the one place where I could talk out the surface “story for publication” crap, and then explore the real underlying motivation and emotions. Most people when you talk to them about something that is emotionally charged want to fix or alleviate the cause of the charge. I don’t want you to fix my life - it isn’t broken. All I want is some one who will listen to me, validate that I have real feelings and that, no, I’m not some freak because I’m upset by some tiny event.
Immediately trying to tell me how to address the surface cause of my emotion, or rushing to say, “I understand, look what happened to me…,” only serves to cut me off further. If I say I had a long miserable drive home, that it took 45 minutes to cover ground that normally takes 20, and you say, “Yeah, but it took me 2 HOURS to get home,” then all you have done is make me feel my stuff is insignificant to you. Any real connection that might have occurred by honest listening will now, never happen.
Several days ago my lunch time plans were disrupted by events beyond my control. I usually only eat out once a month and these plans had been in place for two weeks. Not getting to participate they way I wanted was extremely upsettng. Yesterday coming home was a miserable drive, construction delays combined with leaving at 5:00 pm on a Friday, nearly tripled my drive time. I was supremely frustrated and upset. Without Michele as a safe place to fall I had no place to vent my frustrations, no place to clear off the surface distractors and get to the real underlying problem. This morning only added to my pain as I was unable to follow through on my plans to spend the morning at work. Despite my having specifically asked if I had weekend access to the building, and being assured that I did, I was denied access this morning after getting up on my day off, and having a construction delayed commute.
Happy, happy, joy, joy.
I know that these little things are just indications of a larger issue. As I try to sort through it I think the underlying issue is the disconnect between the surreal landscape I now see at every turn, and the normal one I perceive everyone else inhabiting. The rest of you still have normal lives. Your world hasn’t stopped spinning, your days aren’t endlessly long exercises in emotional tight rope walking. I want to yell and throw things at the people around me. I want to scream at them until they understand just how fucking awful this one event has made my entire life. And yet I still have enough compassion to recognize that they are just being human, and that were our roles reverse I’d be act much the same way they are.
And therein lies the rub, I want to scream and hit and destroy, but I know it won’t help. I want understanding from outside when what I need is acceptance of myself. I need a place with no judgment to express my thoughts and emotions, a place where they can be validated. I have been putting off finding a support group because I wasn’t in the mood to expose my self to strangers, even if they were going through a similar experience. However, I see now that I need a group if only to help me see that I am not the only person going through the aftermath of death by suicide.