I should probably just change the name of this blog to the title of this post, because that’s mostly what I’m going to talk about for a while. The URL is available.

I apologize for all the death posts and I perfectly understand if you don’t want to read them. You don’t have to. They’re more for me anyway. I have to do something and writing seems to be something I can do. Though, I’m still not confident in my abilities to string words together in an understandable way at this point, since I’m still very much in a fog.

First, I want to thank you all for your kind words. Second, I want to apologize for not responding to them. I think y’all can probably understand why, but I wanted to mention it just the same. The amount of kindness directed at me has not gone unnoticed and it shouldn’t go unmentioned. Even if I can’t respond, know that I have read all the comments and emails in the past week, and your words mean a lot. Not a single day has gone by without someone reaching out to me. Thank you.

I haven’t read any of your blogs either, so I have no idea what’s happening in your worlds. If there’s something you think I should know, no matter how trivial you think it might be “compared to what you’re going through,” please, leave a comment. Distractions are good. Distractions and human interaction that I can’t ask for, but need nonetheless are all that’s really keeping me together. That and my dog who has been my savior this week. She has no idea what’s going on and would be as devastated as me if she did, but she has been there and very tolerant of my constant need for doggy hugs. She’s curled up at my feet as I write this.

I went to see a psychiatrist yesterday. On Monday, I called her to get antidepressants, because something tells me that this is not the time to go without them. She wouldn’t prescribe them for me without talking to me first, which I suppose, is reasonable. So, yesterday, I sat on a sofa and told a perfect stranger about the love of my life.

I talked to my sister about it afterward and she asked me how it went. I said something to the effect that she didn’t help and my sister took that as a condemnation of her. What I really meant was that the psychiatrist has no context. She knows less about me than you do. She doesn’t know my history. She doesn’t know that this devastating loss is just the latest in a long string of them.

I alluded to certain aspects; I offhandedly referenced drug use and a past that no one should have to live through, but we didn’t get into specifics. It’s hard to explain my life story in only an hour, especially when there’s a giant elephant in the room. After all of that, I forgot to ask her about crazy pills, so I still don’t have any, but I’ll see her again next week and maybe I can get some.

My car shit the bed this week, because I don’t have enough to deal with. It decided to leak coolant all over my garage. Before Male died, I made an appointment with a BMW dealer to fix that horrible airbag recall, so since my car was going to be there anyway, I asked them to look at the coolant leak. They charged me $175 to look at it and then tried to charge me $593 for a hose. What could a hose possibly be made out of to be worth $593? I told them to get bent. I’ll take it to my mechanic instead.

After keeping my car quite literally all day, it’s still not fixed, but at least the airbag won’t explode shrapnel in my face should I get into a minor accident, so there’s that. I really don’t need war wounds on top of everything else.

Then, I went to the dog park where a woman accused me of hitting her dog. Her dog had used the drinking water to wash his muddy paws, so I refilled it. I wanted my dog to get a drink before he muddied it up again, so when I put the water bowl down, I put my hand out at chest level at her dog to keep him from stepping in it. Helicopter mom came over and accused me of hitting her dog.

“He’s sensitive. Don’t touch my dog.”

“I didn’t touch your dog. I put my hand out so that he wouldn’t step in the water bowl two seconds after I put it down.”

“It doesn’t matter what you did, but don’t ever hit my dog.”

“I didn’t even touch your dog, let alone hit him!”

At that point, a dog park buddy pulled me away before it got worse. It’s for the best, since I would have stayed there arguing all day. I wanted to scream at her. It hurt my feelings that someone thinks that I would ever hit a dog. I didn’t even hit the asshole Boston terrier who bit the hell out of my Achilles tendon two weeks ago leaving me with a nasty cut and deep tissue injury that’s still healing; I’m certainly not going to hit a dog for stepping in a water bowl.

Less than a minute later, her asshole dog stepped in the clean drinking water again and my dog never even got a drink. So, yeah, I didn’t have a very good day yesterday, but at least I felt something. My sister said it’s probably not good that the only emotion I’ve felt other than grief in the last week is anger, but at least I felt something.

Since Wednesday, I have felt nothing except the grief pain in my chest. The volume on everything else is turned way down. I’ve just been going through the motions. Get up, walk the dog, go to work, dog park, stare mindlessly at television for a couple of hours (I can’t read or do anything productive), go to bed, wake up wide awake at 4am. Always 4am. I have felt nothing. I haven’t even cried since Tuesday. I am numb, and not comfortably so like Pink Floyd would have you believe. It is an uncomfortable kind of numbness.

People keep telling me that I’m strong and I can get through this, and while I know that, I keep wondering what the point of all this strength is. Why does it continually have to be challenged like this? I can’t get over what a new sensation this is. I’ve never experienced this before. I stupidly thought that I had gone through pretty much every devastation the world is capable of dishing out.

My psychiatrist said that the numbness is my body trying to keep me together, so that I don’t just melt into a puddle of grief. That’s probably true. All I want is time to pass so that it’s twenty years from now and I can look back with a mild wistful sadness instead of this, because everyone tells me that the only thing that really helps is time. Well, it’s only been a week. That’s not nearly long enough. So, I just keep going through the motions, saying “thank you” and “I don’t know what to say either.”