Fallout

Sometimes when I go to therapy it can be very uneventful. I’ve been rehashing the same story since January when I started going and am often bored by the repetitiveness of it. I just want this thing fixed so I can get some semblance of happy and normal back in my life. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way.

Someone recently told me that I didn’t deserve what happened to me and I didn’t know what to do with that statement. Nobody deserves to have bad things happen to them and I have never believed I was immune from tragedy. What I deserve or don’t in life isn’t a place I ever visit, either before Mark’s death or after, but it got me thinking and I talked about it in my therapy session. “Well, no,” my therapist said, “you didn’t deserve this.”

We talked a lot about that and it feels to me that in order to believe that I have to get mad at Mark. That feels dangerous. To shake my fists and rail against the person I miss the most, the nerdy science guy who fell for the girl with the wild hair, who misses him so desperately she hasn’t figured out how to function without him. And if I do get really pissed and rage for all that his death has caused me to go through since September, will I stay in a place of anger for the rest of my life? That feels even more dangerous.

What I feel safe getting angry about is Mark not sticking with therapy, for not opening up the can of shame and regret that eventually caused him to end his life. For not digging down so deep that he goes back to the little boy who didn’t understand what was going on around him or could even put a name to it. I heard many of those stories the weekend before he died, things I never heard before. Difficult, emotional stories that seared his memory and obviously made a lasting impact. I could only listen. He was the one who had to do the hard work with a therapist of putting the pieces together to figure out how it affected him his whole adult life, and like many things we all deal with going back decades, he locked it up until the sides bulged and exploded.

Like the anguish he must have been in that morning when he wheeled his bike out of the garage, mine burns with the intensity of two people who thought everything would be okay until it wasn’t. In the letter he left behind he said he was sorry FOR ALL THE PAIN and God knows I am, too. Sorry he felt like this was the only solution, sorry I never heard him get up in the morning, sorry for a life that was so vibrant and full and then over, sorry I failed to see what triggered him until months after he died, sorry I didn’t nag him about therapy, sorry for all I did not see until it was too late.

This last week has been merciless in regret and sadness. Facebook says Mercury is in retrograde which is disruptive and can cause a host of problems. Is that what is causing this inability to find any peace? I’m not sure. I know that I carry Mark’s hurt and tend my own and that is often crushing regardless of where Mercury happens to be. The pain that Mark’s death inflicted on me was never intentional, he wasn’t that kind of person, but it has stayed front and center and it isn’t going anywhere until I deal with it.

How I do that will continue to be a long and uphill road, and the what ifs seem like they will haunt me forever. In less than two months it will be a year since Mark has been gone. At once it seems like yesterday and a lifetime ago when I would be telling him a story and he would push the curls from my face. “God, I love your hair,” he would say to me and we would both smile because we knew we had it made.