Continuing onward

I really did mean all of that I said about need­ing to keep writ­ing. How­ever, I’ve been very adamant about keep­ing myself too busy to sit down and take the time to write at the com­puter.  If I have been at the com­puter, I’ve only been on to goof off and try to escape for a bit.  I’m try­ing to work back into a sched­ule now, though.  School is com­ing up soon, and I’ve got to get some sort of struc­ture back into my life.  I guess I’ll just catch the blog up with where I am now.

After the last  post, I did go to the Sur­vivors of Sui­cide group meet­ing.  All I knew is that would be hard and it would help.  It was very infor­mal, and basi­cally every­one in the group just took a turn updat­ing on them­selves.  The date was exactly a month after my brother died, and so painful.  My grief was the fresh­est, and I was the youngest per­son there. Every­one in the room had been in my same state just months or years ear­lier.  They all under­stood exactly what I was going through, and there was no awk­ward­ness or expec­ta­tions on me.  The out­pour­ing of love in the room was heart­break­ing.  If only these men had tapped into the strength and love in the room.

My brother told me, not a week before he died, that I was his best friend.  My heart just filled with love; I believed so firmly that was a sign that we were rebuild­ing that old trust again. Sadly, this is the sec­ond time I’ve had to make my peace with never speak­ing to him again, with­out so much as a good-bye from him before he deserted every­one.  So in some ways, I’ve already done this once. But the sword has two edges, because I feel like he’d still be around if I had only done some­thing, been bet­ter to him, not thought, Oh great, more drama! while I tried to help him through his newest issues.  In fact, I’ve finally real­ized why I tend to blame myself for what­ever hap­pens around me.  I take con­trol over the sit­u­a­tion by tak­ing the blame on myself.  If I did some­thing wrong, I can do some­thing to undo the sit­u­a­tion, or at the very least, mit­i­gate it some­how. As I’ve been read­ing more and more, I’m real­iz­ing that I wasn’t in the posi­tion to change his mind, even had I known it.

Blam­ing myself isn’t going to give me any con­trol over this sit­u­a­tion.  But that hasn’t stopped me from try­ing.  Oh, my brain knows bet­ter, but my heart has been too dev­as­tated to lis­ten to rea­son.  I couldn’t have fixed it, and I’m also finally real­iz­ing I can’t will him back to life.  Seri­ously, this was a major theme of my thoughts. I’d go to bed, try to will time back­ward and the last two months into a hor­ri­ble dream, and spend all my dreams try­ing to rewrite it.  I’ve finally moved past that bit of irrationality.

And gen­er­ally, I’m hav­ing more and more good days. Every two weeks, I have a time set aside to just deal with this at the group meet­ing, and that helps.  While I ache that my brother can’t be here for it, life is sweet again.  My thoughts return again and again with a need to under­stand and make sense of it all, but it’s not the dom­i­nant thought any­more.  When the kids are play­ing with me, I’m not sad that they look like he did as a child, or try­ing to fig­ure out how to keep them from some tragic deci­sion 20 years hence.  I’m begin­ning to see more to life than death again.