Untitled...

Ok ok, this is the 2nd time today that I could enter my blog without *signing in* - strange - but maybe it's the blog telling me that I should write something...LOL. I don't really feel inspired today; yet, at the same time I have the feeling that something is 'boiling in my guts'...something that wants to get out. Do you also know this feeling...you don't know what it is before you begin to write it down and sometimes, in the course of writing, the words that leave your fingertips take a certain shape and when you're done you realize *why* you had to write it...
The last time this happened to me was when I wrote something about my father who died of ALS (Motor Neuron Disease/Lou Gherig's Disease) a couple of years ago. When I started writing my blog entry, I didn't know that the blog would be about him...I was listening to Madeleine Peyroux who was singing Dance Me to the End of Love as the words suddenly started to pour out of my fingertips...and without thinking about grammar, content or style, I just let them float...it started with 'love' and it ended with 'loss'...

Maybe that's what is travailing me at the moment - the thoughts, the worries, the grief that you keep tucked inside - within neatly confined and well hidden places that you don't visit throughout the day - while you're busy at work, or while you're being successfully sedated by your tv set. Grief is a tough labour...it completely devours you, it submerges you...it almost feels like drowning sometimes...your head underneath the waterline...while you're desperate for air...you keep struggling for a while...until it feels easier to let go...to let yourself drown...I've tried to 'function' over the last couple of years...being "the good girl", the reasonable adult - graduating, taking up a teaching job in France, taking up a teaching job at a highschool only recently. At the same time, I've been fighting in these waters for too long...fighting the grief inside...holding back an ocean of tears...carrying the Mount Everest of sadness on my shoulders. It's not that I haven't cried - I guess I have cried a million tears - but perhaps I still haven't cried enough for him...for myself.
Yes, for myself too...seeing somebody you love suffer is unbearable and your glaring helplessness stares back at you whenever you look into the mirror. You feel so pathetic in this part that confines you to being the witness...incapable of being genuinely helpful...I always had the feeling that my best or my all wasn't enough - worst of all - that it was zillions of lightyears away from being enough...I tried to give my all, but my all it seemed pathetically little...I tried my best to "act naturally" around him...and like some really bad over-actor, I smiled too often and sometimes I would laugh hysterically in order to give him the feeling that his disease wasn't a fucking desaster - a desaster I so couldn't deal with. I don't know how believable my act was, but in hindsight, my act was laughably "transparent"...as my despair kept shining through - out-doing my wooden laughter time and again. Sometimes when you smile, you're in fact screaming inside...that's what I was doing for two and a half years...I was screaming my lungs out...inside, behind my wooden smile...

Throughout the course of his disease, I felt like being cast in a tragically absurd movie, the script written in stone - you had no choice but to play your part. The way it was going to end was clear from the onset...there was no way out, no way around it. We knew right from the start what an ordeal it would be, but still, we were nonetheless unprepared for what lay ahead of us...
We all duly played our parts - my father as the terminally ill father, my brother and myself as the helpless and over-burdened 'loved ones'...we played our pathetic little roles until the bitter end, until the grand finale, the dénouement of this sad tragedy of Greek proportions.

As I'm writing this I realize that I'm still mad and furious...how do you get over stuff like this? I think you never really do...but hopefully, you can learn to cope with it...time is a factor (not necessarily a healer)...I know I should simply dive into this ocean...I'm taking small steps though...one at a time...for now, the water reaches up to my ankles...the dark waters I'm facing still don't look very inviting to me...it's dark and it's cold out there and I'm scared...I'll walk a bit further though...maybe once I've waded deep enough into these waters, I'll have the courage to let go, to dive into this ocean without being devoured by it.