Starting Over

It’s been over two years since my last blog post. I’d like to say my time away was spent doing exciting things like going on cruises, backpacking around Europe, creating miniature replicas of tiny Swiss mountain towns, or touring some of France’s finest wineries, but the truth is that I’ve just been plugging away at the same boring old life I had before. Except everything in it is different now.

On an unremarkable day in July 2018, life as I knew it imploded. I lost my sister, my best friend, one of the brightest stars in my cosmos. Connecting with the world and blogging was too difficult after that. Too pointless. Writing became a chore–a useless exercise–and not a bridge, as it had started to become before that day.

I started quite a few blog posts about what it was like to lose someone so close to me. Trying to capture the pain and the changes that come with such a tragedy. I quickly discovered the scope of my feelings surpassed my talent to describe them. To convey the sharpness of the divide between the Life That Was versus The Life That Is Now. Nothing is like it was. Even the things that are the same.

Before you experience true grief, you can only imagine it, and I quickly discovered my own imagination was severely lacking. Countless poems and novels and plays have been created to explore the dark, seemingly endless depths of loss. Movies where beautiful men and women fall to their knees and scream dramatically at the sky exist in their hundreds. Very few of them hit the mark, at least in my experience.

There were certainly moments of violent sadness. Times when the entire world felt irrelevant and I wanted to do crazy, irrational things just to feel alive. More than either of those, though, there was hopelessness. Despair. Anger at the unfairness of everything. Extreme fatigue and entire weeks where I slept 16 hours per day and didn’t bathe. Nausea and intense worry about the fate of my niece, whose father is, for lack of a better word, shitty. And the questions, endless questions about why this had to happen. What purpose did it serve to take a young woman who’d fought through intense depression to carve out a career, a family, and a place in the world? A woman who’d suffered through abuse and heartbreak and the loss of a child and come out stronger on the other side.

The absolute worst part? She was finally getting to a happier place. Her medication was working. She had a great job and a vibrant family. A crazy chaotic farm life she loved. And then it was no more. She was no more. And she will never be again.

That’s the power of death. The finality of it. The knowledge that it will never, EVER change. I will never text her again. I will never see her face or hear her say, “Heeeey, sister!” as she walks through my front door. I’ll never giggle with her or gang up on my mom to tease her or brainstorm novel ideas. I won’t watch my cats, who never take well to others, crawl on her back and fall asleep, purring. I won’t see her hug her daughter. I won’t congratulate her on a a promotion or exchange Christmas gifts.

What is there to say about that?

Not much, as it turns out.