Yes please, post the advice part
Sounds like your sis has a great Dr and great that you both can do something together and enjoy it.
August sounds fab. Let me know your schedule when you know more. Hoping your trip is a good one, all things considered. x
@shaydee I am back August 3rd for 3 weeks this time, I am finding youtube a great stress reliever, I am doing my sister's musical history with me, some special stuff each decade, and her teen crushes - that is a laugh. She is loving it, she gets a surprise in her facebook messages every day, and a nice lullaby each night
And for me - I dance, and listen to dance anthems, you can't be sad dancing.
Here is the 2nd part of that conversation, advice part, that is pertinent to a lot of situations, not just mine - but how weirdly coincidental it came my way.
In 2 parts, as it is too long
Dear Gutted,
After my dad died, I couldn't stand the sound of the television or the radio, the chirpy lilt of news anchors and DJs and voice-over actors, babbling about the latest celebrity gossip or the next big sports event or the low, low prices on Chevy Trucks at a red-hot summer sale. There was no space between their words, no moment where the sadness was allowed to seep in. Even when I walked around in the world, feeling like I was underwater, everything slowed down and painfully clear, the people around me were still moving forward, blindly believing in their own endless progress, their endless reinvention, their endless possibility. We were all tricking ourselves. Things didn't get better and better. Love didn't save anyone. We were all insignificant, invisible, less than nothing. As my plane took off from San Francisco, I remember staring out at thousands of tiny houses and thinking about all of the tiny people inside, whose lives seemed pointless and hopelessly sad to me, just ants scurrying around, busy, busy. One ant dies and the other ants are sad, but then they're back to scurrying the next day. It all added up to nothing.
I don't know that I've ever shaken that perspective completely. The strange indelible stain of a catastrophe stays with you. It alters your DNA. There are always cracks in the pavement after that. A perfect, sunny, wide-open day with nothing but joy on the horizon still feels a tiny bit bittersweet. But that bittersweetness is a kind of gift that keeps your vision from becoming clouded, and keeps you from overvaluing pointless, empty things.
And right now, that jolt, that feeling that the whole world is ending, serves a very specific, concrete purpose: Your sister is here now. You are being called to show up for her, to spend time with her, to help her through this. No matter how gutted and lost you feel, that's what's on the table. Even though you'd like to take her place, you can't. Even though you'd rather crawl into a hole than face this reality, you can't. You don't have a choice. This is where you are. You can see clearly, at last, how fucked everything and everyone is. But you can also see clearly what is being asked of you. You know how important this is.
When you're in a lot of pain, your heart might also close a little. It could take a lot of hard work to pry it back open. When you're devastated, the whole idea of mindfulness feels like a mind fuck, mostly. Breathe in this unthinkable moment, breathe in this terrifying reality, breathe in this impossibly lonely feeling? How the fuck do you do that?
I love what Matt Zoller Seitz
wrote about losing his wife, Jen, ten years ago. He described how, in dealing with his unthinkable loss, he kept trying to skip straight to some happy ending over and over again. Here, this will fix it. Get these kids a mother. Here, this job will fix everything. Happy ending! Done.
I'm so prone to that kind of magical thinking. But skipping to the "happy ending" is actually a way of closing your heart or running away. It's a way of believing in some shiny, perfect place where pain is erased, and everything remains stagnant and "HAPPY" forever and ever. It's a way of skipping life. It's a way of ENDING EVERYTHING.
Many, many people, when they're facing an impending loss or when they're living in the wake of one, power down their ability to feel. They become robots. "This is tough, but I can't think about it now," they say, or, "That was tough, but I'm over it now." Sometimes what they really mean is that they're over EVERYTHING. They don't want to be alive and feel pain anymore, so they are half-dead, but they're still haunted.
So how do you stay in this place instead, with your heart open, when there might be no future for your sister and it feels like there's no future for anyone, really? How do you put your clothes on in the morning and look in the mirror without screaming? How do you show up for her, when it feels like you're dying inside? How do you keep pretending, keep tolerating the blindness of everyone and everything around you, keep listening to the chirpy babbling of empty distractions on the radio and the TV and the internet?
You just do. Even though you're gutted, even though you feel like you can't go on, you go through the motions. You'll get up in the morning and you'll wash your face and you'll cry and you'll have to wash your face all over again. These are not hopeful words. This is just what will happen. You will put on some makeup while thinking about how pointless it is. You will get in your car and you'll drive to see your sister and you will see your distant mother and your disappointing, awkward family and you will say mundane things as you bathe in pain. You will try to figure out what she needs, and you'll try to be that thing. You will be frustrated by what she needs, too. You'll think about how differently you would be doing this, if you were the one doing it. And then you'll feel guilty. And then you'll feel angry at your family. And then you'll feel sick inside. All of it will feel impossible. And then one day, you will be sitting in some hospital cafeteria and you'll cry with 50 people seated very close to you, lit by neon lights, and you'll think, "I can't be here, doing this." But you will already be doing it. Then you'll go back up to face your family and say more inadequate things and bathe in more pain.
This is how life will be for you. You can feel hopeful or feel devastated or feel lost or feel angry or feel nothing at all, but this is how it'll be. You will slog forward, knowing all the while that there is no forward, not really. You don't have a choice to sacrifice yourself. You don't have a choice to run away. You'll have to survive and tolerate a lot of terrifying things.
You won't ever shake free of the darkness that you're facing. It will stay with you. It might not make you better. But you will have
more. You will be bigger. You will be stronger and maybe also angrier. And your heart might be half-closed for a while, even if you try very hard to avoid that fate.
