Things have felt tough since my sister went back into hospital.. I try to stay positive but I am not always great at nurturing myself. Today I took off to the shopping centre as its a wet grey day here, but the feeling inside was desolate, few places to sit if you get something to eat from the take away place… This is not something I do a lot, I often make a healthy lunch at home but today I just wanted to be out and about and I don’t feel that well since coming home after a cup of coffee and serving of chilli fish with noodles, though I must say it was a good feeling to get back to the cosiness of this place and my dog Jasper…
My sister’s son rang this morning on the way to visit my sis, he said he does not really know what to do or say, it can be so hard for loved ones of those battling depression. The person doesn’t need to be talked at, sometimes its just enough to sit in silence and I said to him that receiving a hug and being told you are loved is important.. Often in depression people can feel they are a burden and many deeper feelings can be frozen, buried or hard to articulate due to the numbing of drugs.
Today I cannot help but think of the loneliness that dogged our Mum after Dad died.. I went overseas and in a few years Mum connected with another man who served with my Dad in the Dutch East Indies air force and married him. In fact in the early hours of the morning the other day I was thinking of how when I flew back into Australia in 1987 after 2 and a half years away, my sister and Mum flew to Sydney to meet my plane and take the flight home to Canberra with me. On the flight Mum told me about Ross and said she was marrying him in a few weeks.
I was happy for her but it made it hard, I never got to grieve my father’s loss after he died, my Mum’s grief was huge but unexpressed and my own became buried under addiction in the next 6 years until and then 6 more in sobriety. I moved away within a few months of returning to Australia and thankfully my God parents took me in several times because I got very lost in the years of active addiction that followed from 1987 to 1993.
Meeting my ex husband in 1993 was a godsend as I was in a very low spot addiction wise with alcohol in those final 18 months prior to June 1993 when we met.. I was having accidents and I had sunk to a low point of having no full time work but inside I was also battling the way trauma had derailed me from the time of my accident in 1979 to 1990 when I finally gave up the secretarial career my father forced me into when he forbade any further university studies. It only took six weeks of marriage, (we were married in October 1993) for me to realise I had to get help for my drinking and I was lucky enough to find sobriety following my first ever AA meeting on 6 December that year. I say lucky as so many people do not get the gift of sobriety from their first meeting.
It took me far longer in sobriety to see how the alcohol problem on my my Mum’s side had skipped generations.. Today I was reading a very helpful chapter on dealing with our feelings in the Al Anon book Opening Our Hearts, Transforming Our Losses. In that chapter it talks of how coming out of that feeling wounded legacy which allows little place for the understanding of, or expression of emotion we can struggle with issues of numbing, denial, buried grief and anger as well as problematic feelings of guilt and regret. This is because we were not as children helped to feel our feelings and in adult hood they can get buried or subsumed under other feelings.
Its hard to feel feelings too when medications are the only solution sought, which is the case for my sister. My sister who died was medicated over pain, sadly in final years she expressed a desire to come to AA and Al Anon meetings with me but in those final years I was struggling with the other family members who never found sobriety while struggling hard to hold onto my own sobriety and develop a stronger emotional sobriety myself.
Denial and anger have been big issues for me, as has buried grief. I love the blog The Grief Reality which is written by two girls dealing with the recent death of their mother.. I read this lovely comment on the blog yesterday by Bryan Wagner :
Grieving is my way of adjusting to a permanent change that is so personal I can’t pretend I can change it by changing my perspective. It’s my way of absorbing one of the painful truths about being human. The depth relates to my passion for that which is lost. I think grieving is my way of staying sane.
In the fellowship we equate sanity with serenity and with an openness to embrace all feelings, even those that are most painful and difficult. And this quote from Bryan reminds us that passion is a gift that opens us to depth.. We grieve deeply out of passion and love for what was lost. Deep grief and anger can be hard feelings for some of us to contain,let allow allow and express. For one thing, often our society looks down on them, feels too confronted by them, or tries to teach us we should feel differently that we do. However, to “pretend to change our perspective” would mean we began to lie to ourselves and others about our true feelings..
I will never forget in the two months before Mum died trying to tell my brother how much it hurt her that his family kept such distance from her around the anniversary of Dad’s death to which he raised his eyes and scoffed “but that happened years ago.” But I know to my Mum who loved my Dad so deeply that wound remained as raw as ever around that time of year…he tried to call me a loose cannon when I also flew off the handle at him for the way he rejected one of my older sister’s sons who came to him cap in hand seeking support only to be diminished and rebuffed by my sister in law who is a hard nosed bitch (sorry but I need to call a spade a spade). She was the one who when my mother would come around to visit my brother in the office after Dad died to share feelings said to our accountant (who is now a very close friend)..”she needs to learn to stand on her own two feet and stop looking to Gary for support!”
Its terrible to think of how some people can be exiled in grief and even sadder to acknowledge a culture in which it has no place, because it is a fact that unexpressed feelings of grief do in time lead to far more serious conditions.
Maybe one of the reasons I also struggle in visiting my sister is that when I do I so often just cry.. It is a long trek over to the far side of Canberra to visit her in the facility at the hospital that is only a stone’s throw from where my other sister lived in the care home for those with long term affects of acquired brain injury and my older sister died in this hospital in April 2014. I hope to be up to it tomorrow, however, it would be so nice to have a hand to hold when I go there although I was told that due to Covid restrictions no more than one person can visit another person at this time.
This afternoon its a relief to be home and cosy.. I will light a fire soon and watch a DVD. One of the reasons I went to the shops was to visit the DVD exchange. I managed to pick up 3 movies as well as a stand up comedy performance of Scottish comedian Danny Bhoy this afternoon for 3 dollars.. I am looking forward to watching that as a few laughs always make a quiet afternoon more comfortable and uplifting and provide an uplift when things start to feel grey, tough or heavy.
I am also aware we are only a week out of the Mars square to Pluto and two or so weeks out from the Mars square to Saturn.. This is a time of restrictions here in Australia too as the Covid 19 situation gets more serious in both Melbourne (Victoria) and Sydney (New South Wales). Queensland has closed its borders and there was a depressed kind of feeling around the shopping centre today.. Connections seem rare at the moment… and at sad or tough times it helps to have someone to reach out to.. however I am grateful for resources like The Grief Reality blog and Al Anon literature which provides a voice of sanity in terms of allowing and opening up a dialogue around grief, anger and other feelings. It’s so important to have avenues of expression that make us feel less judged and ‘crazy’ merely for being human and vulnerable.
Below is the link to the aforementioned Grief Reality blog that contains Bryan’s comment.
Emerging From The Dark Night 