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Company doesn't love misery when in mourning
By Deborah Taylor-Hollis
March 2 was 15,000 hours, or 900,000 minutes away. It will be 90 weeks this Thursday. We are coming up on 650 days or 45 fortnights. I am meticulous about keeping watch of the time since my mother went away. I downloaded a program to track the seconds into eternity for me. This is not what they mean by the phrase "letting go."
My friend Bill said, "I was just getting over my father and now my mother is gone," as he recounted his loss of her last month. His devastation is like a bad Hawaiian shirt, hanging on him for the entire world to see, and yet very few people can truly commiserate until they, too, are in this boat--until they are orphans.
Doctors tell us to "let go and move on." I am afraid to tell these well-meaning professionals that the last thing I want to do is "move on." I want to stay right here and wait for her. And I am fed up with well-meaning folks telling me that I am wallowing. These were the same people who told me to "move on" while I was still making her funeral arrangements. These are people with the attention span of spandex and the empathy of toilet paper.
The very level of shallow callousness they can spread amazes me. I secretly curse them with boils.
Eventually, I had to move off ground zero, but it took a Mac truck to make the trip. First it was the intervention. My spouse and three friends cornered me as the one-year anniversary passed and my emotional stability flaked away like shale on the mountaintop.
"Get help or we will get you help" was the message. I caved in only enough to make the appointments with the psychologist and the psychiatrist. Drugs and talk--the fast track to mental health.
I tried to make drug therapy work. First it was Serzone. I responded as one of the .04 percent of trial patients did with edema after four weeks. My feet swelled up so much I thought the circus might call asking who stole their elephant. But for three weeks I wasn't crying all day long and envious of the oblivious squirrels playing in the yard. So I was willing to try again.
We switched to Wellbutrin. I have never met anyone who has used it successfully. I think Wellbutrin is the fancy name for "Placebo." I was miserable and hesitant to watch TV with all those references to happy families. Mine was shattered. Why should Madison Avenue get to flood my life with images of false lives and idealized fantasy parents? I plotted a host of ways to make them pay for the schmaltzy greeting cards, even as I wrote them out to my mom and mailed them to her at her favorite hotel in Hawaii, with no return address. My higher functions knew that they would be "dead lettered," but the child in me seeking magic knew she would get them.
So we switched through Prozac, then Paxil, then Zoloft. This month it's Celexa. Who knows what I will be trying by spring.
The good news was that, in each case, my moments of bleak future lifted enough to remind me of what my real life used to be like. They gave me ways to see my eventual goal, even while floundering in a sea of trial-and-error medications.
I wander on the Internet, reading depression articles and laughing at their "tasks of mourning" lists. To "accept the reality and experience the pain" is far more ambitious than I can envision right now. I would be happy just to close the estate. It is a haunted house I have to go back into over and over--and there is something in the attic that will eat me.
Then I go to the real websites where people post their own personal stories and find things that make me think I am not abnormal or alone. One woman wrote, as part of a longer post on losing a parent, "This last Friday was my dad's birthday and we all made a cake, put his picture on the table and sang to him." I cried, wishing I had thought of that last year, and making a mental note not to let this June 8 pass by without a small party and lighting a candle.
I wonder if my generation was ill-prepared by our parents for their passing, for it seems we are more pained than any group before us. Like Queen Elizabeth refusing to pass on the crown and retire, I wonder if the lack of preparations, the failure to "organize the estate" and the dependence my peers and I have on our aging parents is part and parcel of a larger social change. Or are we just more public about our fears of being alone and in charge than any previous generation?
I hear that failed expectations is a basic cause of long-term grief, although I personally think that Janis Ian and Natalie Merchant's recordings are more responsible than the music industry is willing to admit. I expect to see improvement in a few more fortnights.
Email Deborah at DTHollis@svcn.com.
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Willow Glen, California Since 1992
