I See Dead People

I am certain that one of the most primary factors of what is going on with me right now is that I see dead people.

They are everywhere. In my house, in my life, in my heart. My mother died in 2003, my father and eldest brother in 2007, within six weeks of each other. I have one brother remaining, a handful of nieces and nephews and cousins who are distant.

I am divorced too, single mother to one son. The (ill-advised) marriage died, perhaps before it ever drew breath.

Somewhere in all this dying, divorce and turmoil of the past few years, I died too. I look in the mirror and I see someone else. 20 lbs heavier, I type-out on the MBTI as an I now, where about 10 years ago, I was an E. (Extrovert v. introvert).

My aunt died last fall. She was the one who had all the family memories. She was sharp as a tack until the last time she laid down in her bed at home. They broke out the emergency pain meds, and she floated out on morphine and terminal cancer. And all those memories died too. All the stories. The artifacts remain - those that she kept and that my cousin did not throw away. Those artifacts are in a box in my office. They are unconnected dots because the family is dead.

Everything I've ever known about who I am and what family I come from is gone. All I have is memories, disconnected. I've got a 1,000 piece jigsaw puzzle and only about half of the pieces anymore. Most people could enjoy the bit of lake that did get put together, or half of a big-eyed kitten. I'm only able to see the gaps, the lost pieces.

I've spent more than 10 years being a Good Mom. Now that the lad has begun to turn into teenager, all that hard work seems to be for naught. No one looks at the mother of a teen and says, "ah, what a good mom." The pudding is cooked, so to speak. Though I do know there are important months and years of parenting still to come, my 24x7 vigilance is not essential.

So what do I have left? Visions of people dying, young and old (brother died at 60 - that's young.). I held my mother as she died, I spent many hours with my father at the end, and I witnessed my brother in extremis. I've looked into the faces of the people I love, the people who made me, who raised me, and I've seen death.

Moreover, I've seen myself old and dying. I've seen it like it was today. And the way I feel in my body, the way I feel in my heart, it IS today. And so I wake up every day like it's the last. That, unlike the country songs, makes me feel like it's over, not like it's time to live. Or at least it's an uphill climb to live, to function like I'm part of the world here and now, instead of the world that is gone from my sight.

The emotions and moods come and go, but the simple loss of identity, the loss of people who cared about me on a cellular level - that's the hardest thing to deal with. The world that passed is more real to me. The world I live in now is foreign, bewildering, difficult.

Maybe I am coping... grieving, as the shrinks like to say, but it's just vastly different, and a lot less glamorous, than I thought it would be.

Edited to add: while I say that I wake up every day like it's the last, I do still wake up and have some kind of interest and impetus for living. I always look forward to what the day might bring. I'm decidedly NOT suicidal. I don't WANT to die at all. I don't WANT to be in this limbo between life and the beloved dead, but I am.