0%

I don't have the energy to 'expect the best and prepare for the worst'. 

I don't expect the best, 0% hope, no possibility of better.

He was just playing along when he answered my texts with kisses, when he held my hand.

It felt like more gaslighting, more inauthentic bullshit.

When he came out with me, he must have known that I was trying so hard to make things OK, fighting against my panic and fear with every bit of courage and trust I have?

So, there is no best.

What is the worst?

Grief is the worst. 

What preparation can there be for something like this?

Well yes, you and I will never be the first or last to experience the terrific dislocation and sense of dismemberment losing someone causes.

We are never alone, even if the answer is just a recording somewhere.

Other people have left us answers. 

But my experience is that grief comes in waves - there are now days in-between each wave -  and a grief day will be very bad. Yet I've noticed that the day after a grief day has a bit more available energy in it.

I like Freud's idea that 'we work through it', that the energy bound up by loss and longing is a heroic fight to restore order, restore the lost life. Giving up the fight is impossible until the fight is understood to be really lost. I understand now how Josh felt when he used to weep and cry, begging to be allowed to 'go back', I too have been trying so hard to find a way back to just before the fatal moment.

My pain finds an echo in remembering how poor Josh struggled, his self attack, smashing himself or things up was possibly his attempt to destroy the invisible enemy. 

I get it totally now.

The energy allocation (a process Freud described as cathexis) of the mind is hijacked by grief. Life has been upturned or is in the process of being destroyed, who alive would not want to do anything at all to stop this destruction?

But, as Josh had to realise, we can't go back no matter how much we plead and bargain..

So this is where Eckhart Tolle helps most.

There is only now, and my brain is having to prune painful memories.

Each pruning involves the memory being activated I guess...

Tolle describes the feeling of activation as "the pain body" and describes it as seeking validation through churning up more and more awful thoughts and feelings, Tolle describes this as it feeding. I assume the problem also involves endorphins and so it isn't going to be easy to undo.

The way out of feeding the pain body is to make a conscious commitment to pay attention to the present moment. A detox. Treating any focus on pain as an addiction. 

Meanwhile the feelings of past and future, hope and fear are there and they are so real. But paying them attention is to allow them to feed on my heart. As if they are a shoals of ravenous piranha fish. 

The more energy I can put into awareness of now, the less energy goes to the fish..and they eventually dissolve back into the water.

Preparing is happening though, in the back of my mind, in a tiny crawl space, where some residual 'sane mind' is hiding out. But I'm not preparing for the worst, my sane mind is preparing to prevent the worst.

Meanwhile I need another week of being exhausted, to let myself be as destroyed as I really am.

This is self care also, a kindness to my body.