Sunday, December 22, 2013

Look at the Bright Side

It is holiday time and the losses hurt less than they did last year, but things still hurt.

Most of Larry's friends have disappeared which makes me VERY grateful for the ones that have remained and bother to stay in touch...Steve Heberling and Fahad Javaid, Bob Theer.

Larry's daughter has a handful of Larry's ashes and has ignored all phone calls and Facebook requests for months to get them. (My half were lost in the fire) He wanted me to scatter them in two specific locations and I gave her half of the ashes and she scattered all but a handful in one spot.   I can think of no reason why she is ignoring me.  So it's hard to know I may never be able to honor his wishes.  I do continue to have Jordan, his son, to my house once a month, in fact, he is here now.

I am still really stinging my former town's treatment towards me.

Those are the things that still really hurt.  What I can take from my losses is that I have the unique advantage of appreciating ten fold when things feel good.  When I look around my home, most of my possessions were donated to me and I feel so grateful for what people did for me physically.

But do things feel good right now?  Sometimes.  I still have a situation that is very stressful for me that I need to change.  I am taking steps to change the stress but it is hard to change something when you feel like you are drowning.  I need a break of some kind.  

I am overeating to compensate although I would really like to feel vital and healthy, I can't seem to break the habit.  That makes my Fibromyalgia flare up so I am in a LOT of pain on a daily basis.  Between the physical pain and the stressful situation, I have been very forgetful which bothers me because people feel like you don't care about them when you forget to do something, say something, be somewhere to meet them.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

Yes, there are a lot worse situations than mine, but I kind of hate when people try to make me look at the bright side.  I do look at the bright side and I feel that I'm healing quickly BECAUSE I allow myself to feel bad as well as good.  How many of the people who want me to look at the bright side have been through the death of their life partner, a fire where there was no water, lost all their possessions and a pet all in the span of 9 months? That's two-thirds of what I called family.

If life looked like how I wanted it to look, people would call me and offer to come over or share a meal or a movie simply to acknowledge that things must still be difficult.  My Mom who knows the pain of loosing a child does.  I'm lucky to have her.

Here's the refrain of what people do, they see me and say, "You look fantastic."  I don't feel like I look fantastic at all so I don't really trust that.   Maybe it's the hot pink lipstick.