Third Year of a Life Lost

I wonder when the crying stops?  When does the pain lessen?  When does the longing for your youngest child, your only daughter, one of your two very best friends go away?  The answer is never.  Sometimes it barely subsides.

It seems like I have written reams about Tiffany, both about good times and about her struggles with bulimia and other issues.  But the truth is that it doesn't matter one iota.  What matters is that she is my daughter, flesh of my flesh, born of my body.  She, along with Troy, filled my heart and soul with love and joy and happiness and hope and peace and everything that is good on this earth.  Now half of that heart and soul is missing, leaving a huge hole there that nothing yet has been able to fill.

For the weeks leading up to Tiffany's 3rd anniversary, I experienced some of the most profound depression, other than in the months after Tiffany died, that I have ever dealt with.  I longed and prayed for death to take me because I could not bear the agony of knowing that I would never see Tiffany again.  There was no joy or light in my world; nothing but darkness and bitter grief.  Life had no purpose without my child in it and I no longer felt like a mother.  Troy was physically far away from me and seemingly self-sufficient.  As a mother, I was no longer needed to perform the role that had been my life for more than 20 years.  I was lost in a blackness of being that was all-encompassing and I saw no way out other than to wait for death to have its way.

Yet every day I woke up to face another day -- to put one step in front of the other.  The anniversary arrived and I pushed myself to honor that day.  I brought a bottle of Relax Reisling to toast her memory and we drank in her honor.  Under the umbrella in the pouring rain, I read a poem called "The Cord" to represent the bond between Tiffany and me.  And of course, there were the balloons and the one that got away, somehow escaping from the tie of the ribbon.  And I made it through that day.

Now that day is passed and I am numb again.  Going through the motions of life and trying to keep forging ahead.  Once again, I have had to make a decision to live life as best I can.  So I'm going to a nutritionist to try to lose the weight I gained in 2012, a fact which fills me with despair.  I have made a conscious effort to increase my exercise by walking on the treadmill and around the neighborhood.  And I try to keep telling myself that I cannot do to my loved ones what Tiffany did in the throws of unbearable pain.  I cannot do that to the son whose mother I still am or deprive my grandchildren of their grandma or Paul of the woman he asked to marry him.

Although I can laugh and be happy at times, there will always be that deep underlying sadness to everything I do.  I don't expect that to ever go away, no matter how much time passes.  I will never be the whole person that I was.  A part of me will always be missing.  Time will change the essence of my grief, ebbing and flowing in my being but ever there to overwhelm me unexpectedly.  It's a bit frightening to think that this will be what my life will be like for the rest of my days but I must endure.

I would be remiss not to mention the impact of the death of Robin Williams on me.  Like the untimely death of Cory Monteith of Glee fame, I am thrown back in all its pain to the night I found Tiffany stiff and motionless in her bed.  Oh how those thoughts haunt me down to my soul!  At that moment and for some time after, I wondered what drove my lovely daughter to take her life but today I wonder no longer.  I think I can understand some small measure of what she must have been feeling.  I comprehend how she could have sunk into a despair that was like no other and from which she could not overcome.  How one more setback or one more unbearable thing could have pushed her over the edge.  And my heart breaks for her and for Robin Williams and everyone touched by suicide -- the survivors, the bereaved and the lost.

So let us remember our loved ones in all their living glory, perfect and flawed.  Pay homage to their memory, be forever grateful for the time we had with them and hope to meet them again wherever death leads us.