Tag Archives: death

Why am I here?

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Why am I here?

It is truly a great question. I don’t really know. Why am I here? Why is anyone here at all? What is the purpose to be alive? This question always sends me into a tailspin of depression when I think about it for too long.

How do you find meaning in your life, in the future of it, when it is impossible to find meaning in the past?

Sometimes, I stand over a dark hole just teetering at the edge. Why don’t I fall in? Jump? It wouldn’t matter really. I could curl up, close my eyes and sink into the darkness and be gone.

Instead, I stare at a man. I look at him and ask, why are you here? He is old and frail now. He is waiting to die. His mind flits back and forth between the years of his life and one moment he is in the past and the next he is in a world that never existed. Why is he here?

You, my father – the decrepit old man who no longer walks. The man with the face of confusion and fear and helplessness.

I should laugh at the way your life is ending. I should rejoice in it. I should relish in the hand that karma has given to you. As I watch you die, I feel loss. A deep intense loss in the depths of myself. I’m losing my father. Not you. Not the one I have, but the one in my head. The one I hope for. The one that I hope will emerge one day and tell me he is sorry and it was all a mistake. I’ll lose my hope. My chance for answers that I don’t really want. I’ll lose that chance that one day you might wake up and realise you want me. I’m losing that part that maybe one day you’ll tell me it wasn’t my fault.

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But I am losing something I never had. All I am losing is things that I hoped for.

Why are you here?

I stare at you sometimes. You’re almost bed ridden now. Your skin hangs loosely where age and sickness has stolen your muscles. You have legs that don’t hold you. A mind that doesn’t guide you. You have frightened eyes and I a gaze that maybe I once had. One that’s innocent and lost and needing something, yet so many times all that stared back at me when I had that face, was you. You and your anger and your wants and desires. Not once did you stop. Not once did you look into my eyes and see my tears. Yet I do that for you.

Somehow it is the other way around and you are the scared one. You are the crying one. You are the one needing someone to come in the dark and make it all okay. You ask me to do it and I do. Guilt tugs so damn hard in my chest that with everything, I can’t turn away. I can’t do it. How did you?

After everything you have done, I cannot hate you.

Why am I here?

I have no idea, but why are you?

Twenty Minutes in My Head

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Twenty minutes of the thoughts from my head.

I think that my father cannot bear to let me have anything in my life. It doesn’t matter if it is good or bad. He becomes like some petulant child jumping up and down, screaming what about me?

Well what about you?

It’ll take me a lot to write this and to not allow the anger that is bubbling inside to come out and pour onto this page. I feel the anger from it and him and his words and his … I don’t even know the word to use here right now. But I feel it. I want ti cut it out. Nothing would please me more than to go upstairs to my bathroom and take out the blade I have specifically for my self-harm. letter-writing-pic

He did it again. Like always he comes in and lays waste to my already shaky foundations. He comes along and destroys what is there. It doesn’t matter how much building I do. How much protection I try to put between us, he knows how to shoot for my heart and he does it every time. He doesn’t miss.

I passed my first year of university not so long ago. I got a first too. I was very proud of myself. Of course my father felt he had to come along and claim his prize. Hold me up like some trophy and proclaim to everyone how hard it had been to bring me up. He bowed down graciously and received applaud for his efforts as a father.

I said nothing. It is terrible to say that I hope he has died by the time I graduate. The day I get my doctorate I don’t want him to be here. I don’t want him to take any credit. Even if it is fake. He had nothing to do with my education. I will have done it in spite of him.

He struck again a couple of days ago. Those who have me on facebook will know that there was a new addition to my family. A grandson. He is a little poorly at the moment. He was born early and his bowels were outside of his body, but he is recovering and coming along just great.

Naturally this meant that my attention was focused on my family and on this little guy and his recovery. My father thought or perhaps felt a little left out and along he came once more with his patheticness.

I had just come out of NICU when I received my father’s message. He wanted to know what he was to this baby. If he would have a part in his life. I want to ask him if he is joking. I know what he does with little boys. Does he really expect me to hand over something so innocent to him? He went on to tell me things about someone important in my life – things that I know are untrue. They still hurt to read, though. Not because I believed them, but because this is my father and this is how low he has to go to get my attention.

The closing part of his email was one of pleading. Asking me to end his pain, because apparently that is what I do. I cause him pain with how I am. He’s asked me to say goodbye to him. For him to be able to disown me. He won’t. I get this threat a lot, but it still hurts me every time I hear it. It still tears me apart to know that my father ever wants to hurt me. I don’t know why. I don’t know what I ever did other than be his child.

It all hurts inside and I am not sure how to get it out.

Loud Noises

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I keep seeing many posts around the social media that seems to me to be so narrow minded. Of course Robin Williams is still big in the news. I wish people would look at both sides.

I see people say that suicide is selfish. This is people who don’t understand. Imagine being hungry for a week, a month, or as with depression, years. Being so hungry that you would eat absolutely anything. The someone gave you a sandwich and put it in front of you, you could smell it, touch it, and you don’t even have to close your eyes to imagine how delicious it will taste and how much it’s going to take away the hunger pains. Your brain in the moment does not consider anything else but that sandwich. What if someone else wanted that sandwich? Are you going to tell the starving person that if they eat it, they are selfish for ending their pain?

I know that people say suicide is selfish and that the person committing it is not thinking of their loved ones, but isn’t it also selfish for those loved ones to want the suicidal person to stay? They want them to stay because of the hole that they would leave, so that they don’t feel grief, loss – a form of pain that is on the same unbearable level as the one wishing to leave this world? Isn’t that also selfish?

I am not condoning suicide here. Not at all, but don’t hate someone because they did it or attempted it. Don’t tell someone who is suicidal that it’s selfish, because it isn’t. Most suicidal people don’t actually want to die, what they want is the pain to stop. Not to end life. Not to cause more harm. Not to make others suffer, but to put an end to what feels so unbearable inside their minds.

I saw another post today also by someone with terminal cancer. Of course they ranted about how someone with everything, money, fame, family etc could wish away their lives and in Robin Williams case, take it. How could they do that when people like this cancer sufferer fought every day to live?

It’s a valid point. However, depression and any other mental health issue is a killer. Robin Williams didn’t kill himself, as nor did anyone else, their illness did. And if you don’t believe me, think back to the sandwich.

While I can never understand the fight and the fear and everything else that happens with some who is terminally ill, I do understand what it is like to want it to stop. I know what it is like to feel a pain so much in my mind that I have begged God or whoever to please not let me wake up again.

There was another status I saw after that too. Someone had posted that they would understand why he took his life he had been suffering a deadly debilitating illness and they were pleased that actually he might have been because he had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s, so they understood that. Why do they not understand that depression and everything like it is a deadly and debilitating illness?

Imagine the one thing in the world that drives you so insane that you can’t think. Fingernails down a chalk board. The sound of a knife and fork being brought back and forth over a ceramic plate. A loud shrilling siren. Sitting on a nine hour flight with a screaming baby. _65431933_ylvwcq81

Imagine that sound and then imagine listening to it every minute of every day.

How would you switch off the pain in your ears?

 

Numb

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You’ll have to excuse me, it’s a little random.

It’s been a rather weird week, or ten days. I don’t really know, I lose track, things are so hectic. It was my mother’s birthday a few days ago. She would have been sixty. It’s a strange thought. In my mind she is still in her 30’s, that’s where she got frozen.

The weather has been horrendous, a lot of the weather sounds are very triggering for me, lying by the window when I was a child, afraid it was going to blow in, so of course when I lost half the roof to my house a couple of days ago, things like that went through my mind and I felt a little out of it as the parts inside me tried to comprehend things that were going on. numb

It seems like something every day this week. And there have been days I just wished it was over. The power went out for us too, because of the weather, not just my house but an entire two mile radius. I have never seen the streets so dark or my house and there was nothing I could really do about it. I don’t like the dark. I hoped that when I went to sleep, the lights didn’t go out again.

I hope as new storms begin, that my house doesn’t receive any more damage and that we are not plunged into darkness again.

My dad called me yesterday, while the power was out. I am not sure he was talking to me so much, he seemed to not be registering anything I was saying and he was crying. I hate when he cries, it makes me feel such guilt for the way I made the world see him with my books. I feel like I did something wrong. I look in the mirror and wonder how I could have told the world all of those secrets. What is wrong with me to do that to my father?

He was crying because his cancer has spread, he’s been told he probably won’t make the year. I’m not sure how I feel about this, I know many readers will think good, but he is my father still. I write this and all I want to do is cut, because I don’t know how to deal with whatever it is I am feeling. I don’t even know what that is.

All I can think is that he is going to die and he is never going to tell me that it wasn’t my fault. I need him to say it. I need to know it wasn’t me. Not from my readers, or friends, from him. I need to know for real that it wasn’t me who made him that way. I don’t think I will ever get that, though.

His stepmother died a couple of weeks ago and was buried. She’d been his stepmother, my step grandmother from before I was even born. He didn’t tell me she had died. He didn’t invite me to the funeral, even though everyone else went.

When he found out about the roof of my house being blown off, his answer was oops. Not once did he call to make sure we were okay, if anyone was hurt, were the children afraid?

All the evidence is there for me to see that I am nothing to my father, yet I don’t know how to let go.

My older brother contacted me a week ago, the one who was adopted out because my mother hurt him. I haven’t talked to him in years. We talked for an entire afternoon like we had only seen each other yesterday; he has been diagnosed with all the same things as me. He was able to sit and put blame for things in all the right places. I wish I could. I wish I could make the same break he did.

My hands are bleeding as if I have run them along a cheese grater, sometimes I cant move them they are so sore, this is my OCD. The parts inside me are switching so often that some days I don’t even know who it is that stares back at me in the mirror. I woke up this morning and self-harmed because just breathing and getting to the next moment seemed impossible.

Yet with all this. I feel numb.

Please Turn My Life Switch Off

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There was a man once; he was in so much agony from his illness, when he died, while that was sad, it was also a relief. His suffering was over, his eyes closed and for the first time in a long while, he looked truly at peace.

He’d spent so long fighting. He had taken all the drugs and treatments going and fought with every breath he had just to get through the day and the pain he suffered. He held on every minute of his life, even though, some days the pain was so excruciating, he would curl up on the floor crying, begging someone to please take it away and no one could. 1385972_257464541068177_1105653773_n

Occasionally the pain was so bad, he couldn’t even speak or think, all he could do was roll around in silent agony, waiting for sleep to take him and the torture to stop, just for a slight reprieve, but those reprieves weren’t long. The pain would be back, it would keep him awake through the night and he would lie in the darkness, alone, with no one who could make it better.

What a tragic, horrible way for someone to have to live, that death is the only mercy. Often we would say, this person is in a better place now, their suffering is over. And yes, while the family is upset for their loss and they would give anything to have this man back, they never want to watch someone have to live in such a way again. It is a sight that they will probably never get over.

Perhaps you think this man had cancer, HIV/AIDS or some other kind of debilitating cruel illness.

What if this was inside?

Why do people’s view change? Mental pain is just as bad as physical pain. The suffering is the same.

I see so many posts on suicide today and this last week. In September it was national suicide prevention day. Sometimes I think those posts should be labelled, keep the person alive to suffer day.

People who commit suicide are sometimes called selfish or a coward, but go back and read the above. Imagine keeping that inside and smiling outside.

I talked to a friend last night and tried to explain how it is for me. That from the moment I open my eyes, to the moment they close again, I am in such pain inside, a pain so deep and big I can’t even find the words to explain it. I wish there was a way to show people, but I there isn’t. Every moment of every day it hurts. Sometimes sleep doesn’t even let me escape and I am woken with nightmares and suffering.

As I explained this to my friend, I wish with every part of me that I could make it all go away. I wished that I could go back to a time when I was a teenager and make it over then, when it wouldn’t matter to the people it would now. I wished so hard it felt as if I could almost make it real, but I can’t.

And I know, many will tell me to look at what I have to live for, all the good things in my life, but tell that to the man above. Whatever illness you thought he had.

 

I know what I have to live for. That is why I am here typing this, because I can never give to my children the pain of losing me, but it doesn’t mean tomorrow I won’t think or fantasise about being able to turn my life switch off.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What’s the Point?

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I’m trying not to think today, trying not to ponder on the idea of ‘the point’ but I can’t help it. What is the point? A question that crosses my mind so often and sends me spiralling down a path in my thoughts that don’t lead to anywhere good. It’s so hard to come back from it too, my chest feels heavy, like its aching and crying inside, that’s the only way I can describe it. It’s been with me for a couple of days now and I’m trying to fight it, trying so hard because if I don’t I start to think. I stare out of the window like a man stood on the top of a mountain looking down and I watch. man-756833

That moment when the air around is cool and still, like the fresh breath of a new morning, when there are no real sounds, but the buzzing of one’s own mind. When the air is crisp and clear and hasn’t been polluted by the day’s events. When there is peace inside and the thoughts are as clear as the air around.

That is how it feels when I stare out of the window, but if I just turn to the left or the right, the rest of the world is awake and moving and I’m not. I’m standing so still in this moment wondering how it is that these people can go about their normal day and not see it the same way I do. Why don’t they realise that the petty fights they have, the race to work, the worry about the next bill mean nothing. Nothing at all, because in the end, after everything we do; we all die.

That thought leads me to that question; what’s the point? Why do we fight? Why do we do anything at all? Some people say it’s to be happy, but what’s the point in that? Maybe it’s to make a difference in the world, but again, what does that achieve? In reality, every reason and everything we do is insignificant and doesn’t matter. SO why are we here. Why am I here? Why do I live each day with his pain inside?

What is the point?

Just Today

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I got myself up today with my heart heavy in my chest for many reasons. The most important one today though has to be that it is the anniversary of my Nan’s passing. I don’t think a day goes by that I don’t think about her, or miss her deeply. If I close my eyes when it is quiet I can hear her voice saying my name. I can recall her perfume and the way she laughed.I_Miss_you-I_miss_U (2)

13 Years have gone by so fast, but it feels like it was just yesterday. I walked in the hospital that morning and the nurse caught me before I got to your bed. I knew right then that you were gone, but I asked her not to say it to me. I didn’t want to hear the words from her. Even sitting here writing this to you and I feel myself fall apart. I guess what I want to say is that I miss you so much. I wish you were still here. I wish you got to see all the things I missed sharing with you. But I am grateful for the 24 years I got to have you in my life.  You were my favourite person, probably always will be. Without you I don’t think I’d have survived.

I miss you badly.

A Bed

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I feel like someone different today. I’m not sure I can work my moods out. I guess numb is probably the word for it. A sort of pre occupied, don’t care kind of mood.

I’ve had a strange thing in my mind of late. Perhaps it’s weird.

My grandfathers bed.

He had it for years and took to it for about a month before he died on it. It was old and broken and the springs were coming through the mattress on both sides, but it never got changed.

I didn’t have a bed. Not for the first nine years of my life. The only time I slept in a bed was with my parents or when they put me up on a fold out sun lounger at the bottom of theirs. I don’t know why I didn’t have one. I never really questioned it.

My parents moved out behind my back when I was seven and then took me back when they got a new house when I was nine. I even got my own room in their new house, and rather than buy me a bed, they gave me my grandfathers.

I’ve never been able to work out if that’s wrong of them. Should I have been given the bed, mattress and all that my grandfather died on? Was it strange of them to do that? Perhaps it’s just another example of how I was nothing. They couldn’t even get me a new bed, or at least replace the mattress. I used to wake daily almost with my leg torn to shreds from where the sharp bit came through, of course I learnt to avoid it in my sleep somewhat and the wounds got less.

Does this just prove how little I meant? I wonder, if my grandfather hadn’t died, would I have got a bed at all?

Suicide.

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Suicide.

I read an interesting blog post about this today, from another survivor. I say another survivor which is really a lie. That person is a survivor I am not, I just didn’t die that’s all and there’s the difference.

The blog however was insightful, for the first time I had seen, someone saw it the same as me. She planned her suicide date as her fathers birthday, a bittersweet revenge perhaps? Where as mine would be when my father has not talked to me for a while and I’d hope it took weeks for him to learn of my demise. I’d want him to know that he didn’t have the right to be informed. He wasn’t top of the list and he’ll miss my funeral.

Of course before anyone panics, I’m not going to do it. It’s a mere fantasy. I can thank my children for being here and taking away that option. I’ll admit sometimes I get mad about it. It feels like I’m trapped here when all I want is for it to be over. I come close sometimes, but all I do is imagine their faces. I imagine them alone with no one to be there when things in life get too bad. When they just need their dad.

My father is not taking that from my children. I’ve been there for every moment in their lives and I’m going to keep being there, even when the days are hard, when the pain inside is so bad I’m begging almost for it to be over.

I’ve tried before of course to end it all, clearly with no success. The first time I really recall I was seven. I lay down in the bath and just didn’t move with my head in the water. I think I almost did it too, I floated away inside my mind, the need to breathe had gone, and my saviour, ironically was my father and his belt.

I didn’t really try again until my late teens, but I had no fear of death. I took risks, I didn’t care, if death was going to claim me I was going to tease it. It didn’t work of course. Even when I almost died at sixteen some part of me wanted to live.

I’d got septicaemia. It was a loving parting gift in a way from my fathers actions, that I’d been too ashamed to deal with and I was found with no temperature and hardly a heartbeat, my friend didn’t waste any time in calling an ambulance, he even called my father who refused to show his face, he was simply too busy at work to deal with his son that was being rushed to the emergency room.

I was eighteen the next time I tried. I’d landed myself with my special needs son because his mother couldn’t cope and I’d just lost my second child to the cruel hands of fate. I walked out the hospital completely broken, not hearing anything passed the doctors words that started I’m sorry. I spent two weeks getting drunk until I tried to slit my own wrists. The unfortunate timing of another friends visit soon blew the end to that one, but kicked me onto my downward spiral of illegal drugs.

A year later I tried again to end it. A come down from a concoction of drugs and nothing to live for except a son who I was failing, I necked a bottle of pills. I was sick for days after. Funny really I always thought there was no escape when you tried that way, but seems my body wasn’t playing.

Twenty three was the last time. My life was happy. I’d met a nice girl. My son was doing well. There was a new baby on the way. I’d been clean from drugs. I had a job, was going back to school. I had everything, but the pain inside I’d spent my life running from. That agonising sadness that’s nestled deep within my chest was so consuming that I felt helpless. It was a letter from my daughters mother that stopped me. She didn’t know of my past, but she had read some of my writings and she replied to one. I’m grateful to her, she saved my life in so many ways, she’ll never know.

I haven’t tried for a long time since these. Not even when I lost a second daughter. I think about it. It’s in my mind every day. The sadness is still there, but now it’s nothing more than a pleasant fantasy.

Something I keep on the back burner. It pops into my head at random times. When I’m driving, I think, just a quick flick of the wheel and I’m done, it’s over. When I’m out running, what if I just closed my eyes and ran, would a car hit me? Would it be quick?

Then I think of my children. They are better than any sadness I feel. In selfish ways when it feels too much, I let them make me smile.

Goodbyes.

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It’s been two days since my brother died. Two days of feeling something strange. I made it to Monday and he didn’t. He stopped walking.

 

I never know how to handle grief, I’ve never been taught. The only thing I know about things that hurt, is to not feel them. I was stood in the queue at Starbucks in Manchester when my father called me. He could barely get his words out as he told me. It’s been a long time since I have heard my father cry, at least I think I have heard him, I am not really sure.

 

I realised as he was talking that I really felt nothing for his grief I detached. I was listening to his words, and my mouth was saying all the right things to him, but I had stepped out of myself. Each sentence that came from his mouth, my mind took it and pointed at his behaviour. When I asked how he was doing, he told me he felt sick and couldn’t believe it. Then he went on to tell me about my other brother and sister being upset by it all. His words were, ‘we are all in a state of shock about it, and we have been just sat all morning,”

 

I got clarity. I saw it right there. I am not a part of that family. He has never allowed me to be. I keep trying and keep getting the door slammed. Maybe it is natural to him to do that now.  Perhaps he has made it natural for me too. I felt nothing for him. Not even pity, he had just lost a son, but he might as well have been a stranger telling me. Perhaps my emotions decided to take their own line of revenge on him. I remember when my daughter passed, she was still born and I understand that it is not the same, my father didn’t attend her funeral, because in his words, “what did it matter, she was never alive.” Those were the words that struck me this Saturday.

 

He’s grieving to the world for a son he had with another woman, a son he denied was his so many times. It leaves me somewhat torn I think. A battle within me, which side of me is going to win out. The man who just lost a brother or the son that feels anger towards his father.

 

I didn’t sleep so well on Saturday night, not because I was upset with my brothers passing, though I am, but because my mind was on the fact, would my father even tell me when the funeral is. Would he allow me to go? Would this be just another event when I am not allowed to be part of the family? When his own father passed away, I did not get told. He was dead and buried and I never heard a word about it.

 

Today I see clear.

 

To my brother. I wish we’d got around to that beer. I’m glad I knew you.