Month: November 2018

Life. Love. Death. Grief. It’s Complicated.

Insert the angsty teenage soundtrack circa 2002 here…

“Why do you have to go and make things so complicated?
I see the way you’re acting like you’re somebody else gets me frustrated
Life’s like this you
And you fall, and you crawl, and you break
And you take, what you get, and you turn it into
Honesty and promise me I’m never gonna find you fake it
No, no, no…”

Thank you for the snappy tune that always plays in my head when I declare my frustrations Avril Lavigne.

There wasn’t a lot of real angst for me growing up, perhaps some mild manufactured teen dilemmas that supported my need for chokers, black nails and lips, and a trench coat before they became truly taboo. No, I grew up in the middle class, in a sleepy suburbia, the older, wiser, more academic and musically inclined sibling of a picture worthy nuclear family. Life was good, I had great friends, and was an active member of our church, albeit many years begrudgingly. Not the kind of girl that ends up in this type of story, although the landscape has certainly changed over the years, I may have said as little as one, two, or certainly three years ago, we will never be that family.

The trouble is, its a lot more complicated then we think it will be. Life, love, death, grief. Its so much more nuanced than we realize until we have to live it. Luckily for me, I either don’t look like the type of person that tolerates “If it was me…” style advice or I just don’t keep that type of looky-loo in my life or I tuned it out, regardless I just didn’t hear much of it. But you know that advice, the kind you get when you are definitely not asking for it, when what you are looking for is just someone to see you instead of give you their two cents like you were holding a tin cup out in some highly peopled area. The problem with that advice is it rarely, if ever, takes into consideration is complications.

As I write this I keep assuming I have to back track a little, take two steps forward and one back, and maybe that is because I need to be reminded of the story before the story you are here for, because the context matters. It matters to me and my kids and for some reason I need you to know, maybe so I don’t look like I was one of those women from one of those families. As I typed that I cringed, for the sheer fact that I still feel sometimes like I need to defend myself, my choices, my life, which is in the biggest way, me still defending him. It’s complicated; life, love, death, grief.

I was reminded of that as I set about decorating the house for Christmas. I can count the number of Black Friday shopping trips I have ever done on one hand, after my stint in the world of retail I had almost no desire to ever be involved in those types of sale induced shenanigans ever again, save the couple of years we had two toddlers and the sales were actually still great. Instead I picked up the habit, er tradition since it is the holidays and all, of putting up the Christmas Tree the day after Thanksgiving, but not a moment sooner. This year, as I unpacked the ornaments from their neat boxes and bundles of tissue or bubble wrap I was struck by the most complicated thoughts of all…I have no idea how I feel about this or what to do. I lined up the monogramed and carefully dated, the military themed, and the Purple Hearts, nine of those so far, wondering how I would feel if one shows up in the mailbox this year like it has every year since he retired. I debated hanging them on the tree to remember the life we once enjoyed, the first year we were married, those first ridiculous ornaments that made us laugh so hard we started a tradition of finding the worst/best every year; I thought about   pretending I didn’t see them at all and packing them away, starting fresh and trying to forget; I settled for a little of both and a family vote about the rest.

The weird thing is that in feeling nothing I felt everything as I looked through the bins of decorations. I was angry, sad, frustrated, lonely, scared, nostalgic, it was complicated; life, love, death, grief. It continues to be as complicated in the PS (post-suicide) life as it was before.

It was complicated because: he wasn’t always that way; he was sick; he was not prepared well for this world; he did not find meaning after the loss; I did not always know how deep or how old the pain he carried was; sometimes he was who I had met that first day; his big heart still had a way of shining through right when I was ready to throw in the towel; he was a product of war, his job, a thing he chose and yet didn’t.

It continues to be complicated, life, love, death, grief, because his “stuff” became my stuff too, because I was the one gathering up and reassembling the pieces as they scattered over and over again. I was the one apologizing on his behalf and feeling the weight of the things he had said and done to the people we cared about most. I was the one pleading for him to open his eyes and see what he had, rather than what he didn’t. And then I wasn’t anymore.

Even though the vacuum was filled mostly, at first, with a sense of peace, complications arise, of course. Life, love, death, grief are complicated. The pendulum swung from anger to sadness, love to hate, hopelessness to hopefulness for so long and so often that stillness, once it arrived, felt like an alien planet most times.

Peace, now that is complicated, holding all of life, love, death, grief and everything between in it. Finding it, holding it, and living in it, is equally so, but the beauty in it, is finding grace, the fierce kind. The intense kind that knows all, sees all, and yet loves all. That is the gift of the complications and I try to do my best to live in that grace every day. For me. For my kids. For you. And for him.

Well, actually it was an afternoon a lot like today will be, bright, crisp, and filled with the anticipation of the holidays. I know it was a Thursday because he had DUI court and I had taught a yoga class that morning.

By all accounts it was set to be an awesome day. I loved and still love Thursdays, Yin Yoga is a gift to the body and soul and I am always grateful to start the day sharing it with my students. He had found out they were extending his Thursday morning court house visits by two more weeks each cycle, he was 11 months and some change sober, and he was in a great mood when he called me to report the news and tell me he was going to do some “looking,” a little pre-gaming for Christmas shopping if you will.

I got home first. He wasn’t far behind and he jumped right on the ATV when he arrived but came back shortly, not a strange occurrence by any means this time of year, he was always running to the woods to check trail cams and see if there were deer in “the back forty.” We nearly crashed into one another as he walked in the door and for a brief second I think I left my body. I knew when I saw him. My stomach ached, I was probably white as a sheet and I immediately said goodbye to the friend I had on other end of the phone. He had taken his last first drink and I knew it, even before I ever smelled it on him or found the can he had tossed into the woods that day.

The thing is that 11 days, 11 weeks, 11 months of relative peace can feel like an eternity when life has been relentless for so long. Its long enough to let the guard down, its long enough to let hope live, its long enough to forget the pain and let the fear rest, until its not. It only took one breath, one decision, one moment, one drink, to derail all of it.

And you know what? Trauma is so intelligent in the way it imprints in your cells, so you remember, in order to keep you alive, and when it gets set off it’s like the moment they throw the switch on the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree. It all lights up. All of the anger and heartbreak, hurt and destruction, sickness inducing deep despair, it all came back in that one second. The three past years of arrests and jail time, all the whiskey, the smell of it seeping out of his pores after days of blackout drinking, the times he tossed me aside like a rag doll or had his hands on me in anger, the things he said to me to try and destroy my spirit, the fear in the voices of my sweet babies, all of it coursed through me like a drug hitting every inch of me all at once. It nearly broke me. And then I remembered. The babies, at this point 8 and 10, they need you to collect up your pieces and stand strong.

I did not know how exactly things would progress this time, but I knew in my gut it was going to have to end differently. No one could give him what he needed to heal because he was unwilling or what I came to understand later, unable, to summon the strength to do the work. The world had broken him beyond repair, at least that is what he believed. It had also gifted him, through his own baggage and trauma, the thought that he deserved all of what came his way, even though at the surface he would blame anyone and everyone that stepped in to intervene for his trouble.

What followed was the beginning of the end. A chain of events, even as they were, that were punctuated by hope.  He finally showed up in between the binges and rages. Maybe he was sorry, I thought, maybe he did want to change, maybe he could be the dad the kids need, but how we would make that work I could not say. Those last few weeks rode like a an old school wooden roller coaster, smooth, even gentle, and then bone rattling bumpy; darkness punctuated by moments of light, hope and realization; words of regret and apologies, followed by visceral anger bent on destruction. I lost track of how many messes I had to clean up in that time period, how many tears I wiped off my own face and my babes, how much of what I had worked on so hard in myself those last few years had to be scooped up over and over, again and again.

By the time we would reach the end of that first week in December I would be exhausted, to the core.  Bone tired was an understatement. Up to that point I had wrestled so hard with what to do, to call or not to call, have him picked up or committed, either way I lost. I would never be forgiven. It was always me to blame, somehow I made him do it or I got him in trouble when I could have kept my mouth shut, but soon that was no longer an option. The sickness was too much for any person to handle and no one seemed able to get through to him.

For now, what I will tell you about that last night we spent as a family, is this…I would not wish it on anyone, ever, and I hope none of you ever have to watch someone unravel in the way that we did that day. And for those of you that have been touched by addiction, severe PTSD, anxiety or depression, and/or the profound loss of suicide, I am so sorry and I see you and your pain, your hurt, and the regrets. For us, there would still be one night of uncertainty as he ran, five days of what seemed like relative “safety” behind bars, and then three and a half weeks of waiting and ultimately saying goodbye.

But that is a story for another day. This has been enough for today.

I’ve honestly been thinking about this since early this past summer. When it is time, I wondered, where will I begin?

Do I begin the first time I had the choice to crumble or rise, during the 4 hour long car ride to Las Vegas with two of my childhood best friends, that came to keep me company and have some good quality girl time during the deployment? Halfway into the desert I got the call; “I’m fine. If they call you, don’t worry, I’m fine.” They never called and he was not fine. And we drove on, because what was I going to do but wait until the phone rang again. There would be two more incidents that I should have received a phone call about, should have, thanks for the heads up, not that it would matter except maybe I would’ve realized how much he was hiding from me a lot sooner.

Maybe I should start with the paper towels and how there being one left on the roll set him off in such a way that it made me fear for his mental health. It was a little over a year after homecoming, I had been working full time, odd retail hours, until our daughter was born. I didn’t notice before. We were like ships passing in the night and he was a good secret keeper. But not that evening. I was officially worried but didn’t let it all show. We had a newborn. I was up all hours and so was he, but not because of her, the temper was shorter every day, and the last paper towel on the roll and the kitchen counter bore the brunt that day. In the weeks that followed, I would learn about all kinds of “incidents,” moments that were punctuated with blinding migraines, blacking out and fainting during PT, and memory loss that he was no longer able to hide from his peers.  I sat in a conference room at an outpatient Traumatic Brain Injury Program listening to the mile long list of symptoms, holding my composure, vacillating inside between anger and fear, but only showing resolve. What else was I to do? Someone had to keep it together, to be the cheerleader, to hold the hope.

If I could tell you when the drinking became a problem I might start there, but I can’t so I won’t even try.

It was a storm of things, a shit soup for lack of any more accurate or appropriate terms. A career Marine, recovering from 3 separate Grade III concussions, a severe PTSD diagnosis, still widely considered a kiss of death back then, and turns out, a penchant for alcohol abuse, an addict. His career was done the minute treatment began and he had to let people in to see what was happening. He would never deploy again, he would never return to the fleet, but he would return to the desert thousands of times over the course of the next decade, until he lost himself for good.

Maybe there isn’t one starting point to this story and maybe I need to just give up that neat and tidy idea that to every work there is a beginning, middle, and end. Maybe sometimes when it feels like a lot of heavy, mucky middle ground, its because it is.

What I do know is that what happened here over the last decade had been the slowest form of death I think I can imagine. It was the kind that holds the capacity to take out every one around it, like a plague. It attempted to dismantle us all piece by piece, it was relentless, and I often felt like I would drown in the chaos of it, or worse. Sometimes I look back and wonder how any of us managed to make it out alive and then I am reminded of a passage from Viktor Frankl’s book “Man’s Search for Meaning.” It’s a memoir, a recollection of his time in Nazi death camps and what he, as a Psychiatrist observed and learned from his fellow prisoners. In it he says this:

“…everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms-to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way….

Fundamentally, therefore, any man can, even under such circumstances, decide what shall become of him-mentally and spiritually. He may retain his human dignity even in a concentration camp…that last inner freedom cannot be lost. It can be said that they were worthy of their sufferings; the way they bore their suffering was a genuine inner achievement. It is this spiritual freedom- which cannot be taken away-that makes life meaningful and purposeful.”

Can I be as frank as Frankl here? You have the choice. Always. No ifs, ands, or buts.

I can pretty much guarantee none of us have lived through as horrific conditions as he and the few thousand other surviving prisoners did. Even so, many of us are running around frantic and flailing, rueing all of our days and acting as if we have it the worst of anyone ever. And all along, we each have the choice to see our circumstances for what they really are and retain our freedom or to give it away.

Here’s what I did. I kept my freedom. There were days and periods that I could’ve lost it all, literally. It was so bad at some points that people actually  feared for my life and I am so sorry that I kept myself in a position that caused my loved ones to worry to that degree. I missed it at the time; sure I was afraid sometimes, and I certainly had cause to be a frantic, fearful mess, but for me, there was no way I was going out like that and so I didn’t. I never purposely tried to minimize when things were at their worst, though I am sure it seemed that way to some, rather I was simply maintaining my ability to write MY story and to see the events unfold MY way, rather than be swept permanently into the vortex as it slowly spiraled down the drain.

I chose freedom, despite the circumstances beyond my control.

I chose freedom, even when I felt like a prisoner in my own life.

I chose freedom, so that my kids would survive with the least scars possible.

I chose freedom, because it is the only way any of us makes it out of this thing called life alive.

I chose freedom and it was sometimes hard, because the world told me I should have been acting more like a victim, I should have crumbled under the weight, but I chose different, and now the dividends are paying off in a huge way.

Ok, so I am, as we say in this family, putting a pin in it for just a minute. Let’s pause. Take a breath. Whatever you do when you are in need of a little bit of soul medicine.

I love a good meme. The funny, the dumb, the pseudo-inspirational, give them all to me. And as we close in on 2018 (holy crap time) the dumpster fire, Chris Farley rolling down hill, and little kid on the slide, you know the one, memes and gifs abound. And my favorite, which rolls though my personal newsfeed at a frequency I cannot even quantify right now, is this one:

Here is the deal everyone and the biggest secret to starting to find peace in your life no matter what happens around you…NOTHING IS HAPPENING TO YOU. It’s just happening. My apologies for the yelling, but I need you to hear that and there is no font for a stern serious voice, so caps it is. You don’t need a plot twist, that implies some one or some event is about to come in and shake your life up for the better. You don’t need that, because those some ones and some days and some experiences, guess what? They leave, they disappoint or they fade and you are still there riding the waves, deciding whether you stay afloat or you drown all on your own.

If you don’t do any other self work for the rest of forever, consider doing this one thing. When it hits the fan, which it will, stop asking questions like why does this always happen to me and please please please, for the love of all things good, stop, blaming the Universe or the Divine or God or whatever name you call that which is greater for trying to get you. If you never do anything else, but you make this one shift, everything will change.

Now, this does not, I repeat, DOES NOT mean life will suddenly be all mountaintops, roses, and storm free. But it does mean that when you are lost in the valley and skies look endlessly gray and the flood waters are rising you will remain in control. You see, the minute we ask why this is happening to me, we hand over our power, trapping ourselves in the endless loop of victimhood, a tiny pawn in this vast and cruel game of life.

It is not happening to you, it is just happening, and often, if we are willing to really dig deep and get dirty, it is happening for us. Making the conscious shift from victim of life’s circumstances to empowered participant in control of your own reactions to the fluctuations of life is the biggest gift you can give yourself in the next two months of 2018 and in to 2019 and for the rest of your days on this planet.

Stop waiting and start doing, YOU are the plot twist you need.

First off, Happy Birthday Devil Dogs. Second, what the heck was I thinking?!?!

I have dubbed this stage in our life as the season of firsts…to date this year we have survived no less then three hallmark holidays, two birthdays, three if you count mine, which I do not mainly because I had become accustomed to a lack of fanfare, a day of remembrance, a celebration of freedom, back to school (a mom holiday, am I right?), and our favorite, All Hallow’s Eve. Looking forward I knew, from the aforementioned days that we were getting ready for some big ones…ya know, the one with the turkey and the jolly ole fat guy. I forgot to consider the weight that Veteran’s Day and the Marine Corps Birthday might bear. Memorial Day was a blur, sure we remembered but there is something raw about right now that makes the well wishes of Semper Fidelis in my newsfeed feel a little more weighty than normal. I would like to do what I always do and blame the moon, the transformational power to shed the old and step into the new right now is quite unparalleled haha, but that is a post for another day.

Really, it is that I forget. I forgot. I need to be constantly reminded because the pain of the last years was often so immense it outweighed anything worth celebrating that came before it. And today was a big reminder. The struggle was, as they say, real. And the struggle bus had definitely run over the good, the best, and the legacy, at least for me. So in honor of the birthday of the Corps, and as that reminder for me and a precursor to the story for you, I share this part…

I had never been to any event quite like a Marine Corps Birthday Ball that first time. The patriotism, the ceremony, the uniforms. It was a lot for a want to be hippy, academic, 20 year old supposed system challenger to handle, but I was sold. I drank the kool-aid, I wanted the life, the duty, the sacrifice for something greater than my little self. Even then, 16 or so years ago, the medal stack was something to rival the majority of the room. I forget that, all the time. I remember then teasing him about how much noise he made and would laugh as a couple years later, when he would return to the fleet from recruiting duty, young Marines would stop and ask for pictures, as if he was a celebrity. The medals, the ribbons, the insignia told the story even when he wouldn’t. I forget. I need reminding of this.

And I need you to know, whatever I end up sharing here, that the important part is that there was sacrifice for a greater good, for lives none of us would or could ever know, for events that have not even happened yet. It makes the hardest days worth something. It makes looking at “the stack” which will never grace another uniform or appear in photos with eager young Devil Dogs, a beacon of light in the dark days of the loss. And not just this year, but all the years that preceded the physical death. In fact, when people ask how I have managed to stay afloat this year I often tell them that the end was the easiest part, the death was easy, it was the living that was hard.

After he passed, there was a photo of him and I shared attached to a fundraiser, dressed in our birthday best, and someone actually commented about the legitimacy of his medals. The person even tagged Stolen Valor. I shook my head and laughed because I know it is crazy to see someone so decorated alongside the copy that he had taken his life, succumbed to the service connected injury of Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome in the worst of ways. But this is the secret about PTSD…the strong, the accomplished, the normal, the brave, no one is immune to it. And one of the things I hope to do with this new chapter, beyond encouraging those of you in your own personal storms, is to help change how we look at and treat our heroes, our spouses, and our kids with PTSD.

But for now, I’ll simply settle for being reminded.

Semper Fi Devil Dog

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I have owned this blog for a little more six months. I have had this idea for who knows how many years. I have talked it up and down and told my trusted circle and I have failed, over and over again, to launch.

I pride myself on my ability to get shit done at this particular junction in my life and yet, here I have sat, allowing my bio and introduction to gather dust as if it was an object from a distant past, tucked high atop some shelf I never look at, lacking the guts to make a move on it.

As we creep up onto the year anniversary of the start of this new phase of life, it seems it is time. Time for action. Time to discard and donate those items and to speak.

This time one year ago, like many years before it, the proverbial shit would hit the fan. It was familiar, painful territory. But it had felt different, the lead up, there had been so much more hope with almost a full year of sobriety this time, almost as happy as we could be, almost enough breathing room to relax. It only took that one moment to be right back in the thick of it. A moment I still will never understand, a moment that broke everything,  and that set us on a path that would potentially rob us all of our future as we saw it.

The thing is, in hindsight, we find that the most painful experiences in our lives offer us the biggest gifts. The problem is that hindsight can take some time to set in and we can become lost in the muck and mire in the meantime. We fail to discard the weight of the moments and we sink, not seeing the life preserver or the hand being offered or the light that begs to be let in just on the other side of the storm.

I hope this will be a life preserver.

I hope my story, a story of finding Om in the OMG moments of my life, will help you find the same in yours.