Today I had a personal realization of sorts. Somehow, through simple words on a computer screen, I felt, for just one moment, all the anguish, all the hopelessness, and every other feelings of the author of “A Young Widow”, one of the recent articles here at darksites. Needless to say, it was exquisitely awful. I threw a crying fit that usurped any other I had ever demonstrated. Maybe it was her words, maybe it was the fact that I woke up this morning plagued by pessimism and self-doubt, or maybe it was a combination. Whatever caused it, it was terribly intense and wonderfully enlightening.
I can now plausibly imagine the huge gap there would be in my life if someone that close to me died. My atheism prevents me from hoping for an afterlife, so my view of death is even more morbid and dark and hopeless than that of other people. In my eyes, when you’re dead, you’re gone. It’s like before you were born-except this time around, people are aware that something significant is missing. There’s no big party in the sky, no “see you in heaven (or hell)”, just no answer when you call their phone number, no chance to hear their voice or see them smile ever again, except in your memory and your dreams, or nightmares.
I worry that someone I love will die, and I’ll dream horrible dreams of them at their worst moments. I worry that I underestimate the importance of the people in my life, and that one day their importance will be measured by the suffering I will go through mourning them. Death is a horrible thing to think of when you’re me, especially considering the personal experience I’ve had with it.
I clearly remember lying down on my bed after taking 25 Tylenol p.m. and inviting death to take me. The thought that my death would tear lives apart didn’t even occur to me. I thought I’d made peace with everyone and that I was ready. Some of the people I called to say goodbye to didn’t even take me seriously. How would they have felt if they got a call the next day saying that I hadn’t survived the night? Especially if they’d been the last friend I’d talked to? I try to answer these questions, try to recapture that extreme empathy of this morning, and find I can’t. I’m glad, but also saddened. I want to fully understand the effect death has on people, horrible and painful as it may be. Maybe then I’ll appreciate the value of my own life, and stop wanting to pay back everyone who’s hurt me in a lasting way by hurting them in a much more permanent way. Maybe then I’ll have fewer moments when I feel comfortable just giving my life away in the name of depression, or revenge, or whatever the scapegoat might be that dark day.
I wish I could have fewer days when the theme is pain, fewer thoughts where the theme is death and it’s aftereffects. My medication is intended to help with that, but what if it’s beyond biological wiring, what if it’s my mind itself? What if I am simply destined to always have this overlying morbidity and sadness haunting me? If depression is a disease, then maybe I have a terminal case. Who’s to say? The lessons I’ve learned haven’t been pleasant, and the things I’ve seen haven’t been pleasing to the eye. I’ve felt great and vast hopelessness, self-hatred, doubt, sorrow, and other forms of depression on a regular basis…but how long has it been since I laughed so hard that it hurt, or felt the satisfaction of being truly happy?
I’ve gotten glimpses of happiness but I can’t remember the last time I got a good grip on it and held on. I can’t remember the last time I even had the energy to try…it’s like I’ve been drained of not just the ability, but the ambition to be happy. I mean, most days, if asked, I’ll say yeah, sure, happy as a clam, but only because if I say no I’ll have to explain what’s eating at me, and that is something words cannot always express.
Sometimes I don’t understand it enough to truly acknowledge it, much less talk about it. It’s so slippery…it’s like everything that I clung to hoping that it would make sense out of the world has become sand, and the tighter I make my fist the more I lose it. So I try to find a way to stand on the less and less reliable foundation that I’ve built my world upon, but every day is a struggle against something, and so often I can’t even sleep for the nightmares…there’s something terrible chasing me, and the fact is, one day, I might just get caught.