Author: sheilahjfrench

Where Are You

3 December 2016

Vaughn where are you? Where are you? You are not gone from my heart. You’re in the air I breathe. Your energy has to be somewhere.

I know you’re not in the computer, or the TV into which I stare, searching for relief. Searching to be fed–something to fill this dreadful hole.

When I close the screen instantaneously the hole is there again. Still there. Gaping wide, its huge ugly black maw.

Nothing can fill the hole you left behind.

Where are you Vaughn.

You’re not in the food I toss down my throat in an effort to distract myself from reality, nor in the wine that doesn’t even taste good anymore, and is increasingly short-lived in its ability to numb.

I know where you’re not…I just don’t know where you are.

Right With the World

18 November 2016

I heard you last night, Vaughn. Your voice so deep. I wish I could remember what you said.

I remember when I found out, through a message you left, finally, on the home phone, that you were alive up in Oregon, after I’d spent–how long–two weeks, three weeks–worried that you’d died.

You were alive!! Stress and worry slipped off of me like rain down a windscreen. I was light; the world bubbled around me and I saw it, heard it, and was suddenly in it again.

Now I feel the wind blowing in my hair and the late afternoon sun warming my face…but it’s without you. How can I ever again feel that all is right with the world?

Survive

28 October 2016

When people ask me how I’m doing, I think, ‘I’m just trying to survive.’ I don’t know what I say–probably ‘good’. Hah! Truly I’m just trying to survive. If I can maintain some basic level of mental and physical health, maybe I will make it to a time when I feel a little better. When I have energy for more. This is what I am doing now, what I can do:

Trying to stay relatively mentally and physcially healthy. That’s about it really.

Allow myself to feel moments of pleasure or happiness when they come.

Try not to wallow.

I don’t have the energy to waste on self-criticism.

Awe

30 September 2016

Maybe the awe that we feel when we’re floating through the Grand Canyon or looking at the stars is not so much a sense of how miniscule we are, but how immense a thing we are part of.

There She Sits

28 September 2016

This afternoon the sky was so opaquely and emphatically blue I imagined I could eat a nice fat slice of it. Perhaps with a garnish of Douglas Fir and a side of creamy white cloud.

So thought I while lying in the shade of the fir clump at the cemetery, having just finished muscling 28 daffodil bulbs into rock-hard parched soil in the mid-day sun.

What an odd circumstance in which to find myself. Planting flowers around the graves of my ex-husband and my son. This continues to surprise me. I can’t help watching myself from a slight remove, trying to believe this is actually what I’m doing:

“See, there she sits–the lady who’s ex-husband and son died,” I as observer say. And amazingly, I have to recognize the truth of this–she is me.

Running

28 August 2016

The fact is, I have been running away from it.

Not that there’s any escaping.

It’s always there, waiting.

I drink and watch television and eat sugar.

And it just waits.

And if I keep drinking and watching television and eating sugar that’s what my life will be. An evasion.

Not even an evasion; more of a burial–a half-burial–a half life.  Avoiding living life fully so I don’t have to experience the pain.

Not EVEN that: a burying of myself WITHOUT getting any relief. Drinking and watching television and eating sugar, all the while knowing the pain is still there. Throwing myself against the door to keep the pain away, but it just leaks in around the sides.

I have to open the door, accept this pain, really surrender to it–honor it, if I ever hope to move forward in my life.

Summer Solstice

19 June 2016

It’s a full moon tonight, Vaughn. And almost the summer solstice. The fourth since you’ve been gone.

Sometimes I feel stronger and better and happier, Darling, but I always miss you. I will miss you until the end of my life.

I don’t know why everything went so wrong for you my love. You certainly didn’t deserve it. It wasn’t your fault. Blaming myself doesn’t truly make sense either, even though I wish I’d done some things differently.

I didn’t have you for very long. I loved you so–I hope you know that. I know you loved me. I know you loved Livia.

My sweet sweet boy, how I miss you. How I miss you.

‘Normal’

18 June 2016

I’m feeling strangely normal today, or at least how I imagine ‘normal’ people might feel. The time is not rushing or dragging. I don’t feel depressed. Nor do I feel elated. I just feel kind of here. I wonder if depression and elation are ways of not being in the present.

I cried a bit last night, and I felt rather down today when I walked with Julie and she talked about Anthony and his girlfriend–how I wish I could talk about Vaughn and his girlfriend. When I came home I felt tired and had to resist my bed’s call.

But I went outside and did some work, ate when I was hungry, and now just feel kind of normal. Didn’t even feel like a glass of wine for dinner.

I’m not berating myself; I’m not fluffing myself up.

Weird–maybe it’s just the weather. Feels like summer’s here.