Losing a loved one when you have a history of depression is like trying to play catch with a chainsaw.
With an eyepatch.
You know you're not going to catch that shit right, that's not even a fucking question. You can see the magnitude of the problem that's about to hit you, and there's ducking out of the way because then you're not playing catch at all, are you, you terrible person? And the other guy will probably chase after you with the chainsaw anyway because he'd have to be some flavor of sick bastard to be forcing you to play eyepatch-chainsaw-catch in the first place and no, this metaphor doesn't make a lot of sense. You can see it coming, you can recognize "this is going to suck" but you have no idea when it's going to happen.
You just sit there in the hospital room and something objectively horrifying happens, and you go "man, that's going to suck later" and you get on with this because it's not about you right now it's about the person dying in the bed. And then they're gone, and everyone goes "I'm so sorry" and "is there anything I can do to help?" and you put them on little tasks for this and that or bigger things that you can't handle but they can and everyone thinks "HOORAY I'M HELPING" and you're still sitting there and you can see the chainsaw's already in the air but you have no depth perception and you don't know when it's going to hit you.
And then it does.
But by then all the people have gone away and the ones who are still around have moved on to worrying about their own things which are totally legit things and you can't bother them because well they helped months ago and we're doing something else now didn't you get the memo and you're just standing there with a stump of an arm and you don't know how to make it better and there's still three more chainsaws in the air.
Aye. Grief is a fucking bastard of a headspace. Isn't quite like anything else, I don't think, but it'll aggravate anything else that's there.
:sad:
It is like that. There is something horribly irrevocable about death that makes it a punch in the gut.
After my breakup with Mr. Language I spiraled into a bad bad depression that actually started coming on while we were still dating. In September, I think. It actually started when my PTSD was triggered by a movie, something which happens very, very rarely... I thought not at all, anymore. I've done a lot of work on it, so I didn't expect it, it just came out and hit me in the gut out of the blue.
By the following May, I was walking around underwater all the time. I could see that things were OK, even beautiful, but I couldn't feel them all the way down here at the bottom of the ocean. Then my mother-in-law died. Then my friend Susan died. The grief on top of the depression was overwhelming. It ended up being an incredibly catalytic period of my life, because all I was doing was drinking, crying, and making beads, and I hated it. I knew that I needed to change my entire life, or be stuck in that forever. So, when I gradually started coming out of it, finally, I went to school.
Thanks for letting me vent here.
I'm still fucked up about my dad, and I'm not even depressed. I can't even imagine.