Discomfort

LoL , yeah I know. I'm supposed to be on holiday but things happen even in this slacker life.

First I'm going to post something here. It's from something I wrote on another blog awhile back. Maybe it could explain a bit. Turn a river. Prevent someone from feeling uncomfortable in their life choices.

It's about the first time I laughed. After my son died.

And some days? Aren’t.

“…One day at a time is the best way to deal with this. And trust me there are going to be good days as well as bad ones. I still remember the first time I really laughed after my family member died. First I laughed out loud and then I stopped in a kind of shocked silence. It felt so good to be happy after being sad for so long. After that I began to look out side of my grief at the world. Still had the bad days but there were good ones too. Now more good than bad…”

I was writing to someone who'd lost a loved one. It's so hard. This week I talked to yet another person who'd lost someone close to them. She had the same experience that I did. So did her mom. There is that moment when enough time has passed that you laugh. Then in some cruel mean thing the second after that laugh you feel this tremendous guilt for being happy. How can you be happy after someone you'd loved so much has experienced such pain. You should always feel that pain too.

You shouldn't but the thing is that a person at that stage of grief is in pain.

As time passes, months for some and years for others, the pain or your reaction to it changes. You do forget but you come to realize that to make yourself feel so sad as a kind of punishment for surviving isn't right. You begin to see that being happy and going on with your life is really a good thing. For me that laughter took a while to change from a blue to a delightful yellow. It just takes time.

I watch Craig Ferguson for a reason. You see for some unknown reason he was the person who got me to laugh. The very first time that I saw his show and he told a joke, I laughed. Since then I've begun a kind of self directed laugh "therapy". It's worked. I've begun to "color". Life that had been black and white became like those old technicolor movies. Oh, it took a while for the unhappy to fade but it did. Then last year when I got to go see water again I felt joy. The old joy came back. Like a seed it grew. Happy. It started with that very first laugh.

(I'm sorry for the sentence fragments but it seems like a good idea to leave them be.)

I used to have a writing buddy. She once was in the process of writing a story when I asked her not to kill off the main characters. It was a beautiful story but I'd read enough of her stories to know that the ending probably would be all kinds of uncomfortable. After I asked she told me not to analyze the story but to feel and enjoy it just where it was and each minute until it's conculsion. She told me that to understand the story I needed to feel it. If I analyzed it I'd have to break it into pieces. That would tear the story and the viseral feeling. Now I think that is how my life is. I don't want to analyze it because it's taken me so long to get where I can feel it again. Happy. Sad. Joy or sorrow are in perspective. Nolonger colored by the pain of losing my son.

LOL

A kids song from my Sunday School days.

"I've got the joy, joy, joy, joy down in my heart. Down in my heart. Down in my heart."

It feels pretty good.



I know that these last couple of posts have seemed odd and out of character. This is truly ironic. My writing and blogs is me being a writer. In order to learn to create believeable characters, the "I" of the writer, the id, must be secondary to the story. True there is the writer's voice but that's just the house of words where the characters live. It is ironic because these "uncharacteristic" blog posts are actually very characteristic of the real me. If I had this "life"? I'd be exhausted.

LOL I'm not broken. It's the opposite. I've been healing. Gently. Trying to laugh every day. The laughter feels very very good. It's made me appreciate the happy. You know like the morning after a storm when it's sunny. Everyone is safe.

Happy.

Hugs,

Ann

PS Now I'll go back to writing this character who I have great affection for.