The Thrill Is Gone
Most of the time I feel like one of the zombies on The Walking Dead. In a week it will be eight months since Shayna passed. People keep asking me how I’m doing, though not as much lately. The daily contacts have become semi-weekly, then weekly. The people who opened up and started sharing their feelings have slowly shut down going back to their old selves. People seek homeostasis. We seek a state of normalcy and even when we are shocked out of that, the only that causes real change by the way, we usually quickly go back to where we were. That’s nobody’s fault. That’s the way we are wired. That’s why it takes major tragedy or pain for many of us to ever truly make a major change.
Some things are such a shock to the system that we can never return back to where we were. If you tear an ACL, you can rehab the leg and get back to where you were before, maybe better. If lose a leg, well that leg is gone. You will never walk or run the same way again. You can put on a prosthetic and learn to use it. You can wear long pants to cover it up and the world might never know you’re walking on a prosthetic, but you know it. That’s where I am today. Learning to use this prosthetic, learning to walk, maybe even run one day. From where you sit, it may appear that I have two legs. I do not. I will not. Something is forever gone.
I’ve been hearing that the way to overcome anything in life is an attitude of gratitude. Want to be enlightened? Practice gratitude. Want to attract good things to yourself? Be grateful for what you already have. Want to be happy? Focus on the blessings you have been given. That’s all well and good. And as I hear it I really want to participate. In church this last week we did a gratitude practice. I have a lot to be grateful for. I have had the best life I could hope for. Ty and Kayla and Shayna made my life blissful. I am extremely grateful for that life. I’m grateful for the gratitude we had while we were having that life. We always knew how blessed we were. We didn’t take a moment for granted. We didn’t take each other for granted. That life, however is over. That life is like a photo album. I can pull it out and look back on it with fondness. This life, oh this life… I don’t even know what to say. I’ve said it before. It’s like living in a world with no color- black and white TV. The joie de vivre is gone or as B.B. King would say The Thrill Is Gone. There are times when things are “OK”. There are times when I forget what my world is really like now. There are times when, in the back of my mind, I’m thinking Shayna is just at school or at a friend’s house. Even after all these months, there are times when I half expect her to meet me at the top of the stairs and say “Surprise!” Then I tell myself “No. It really happened. Your life really sucks.” And I’m back.
I fill my days with tasks. That’s what keeps me moving forward. I wake up with a mental to-do list. I have a list of at least three or four things I need to accomplish to provide for Ty and Kayla. I’m trying to get the business streamlined to make it easier to run and more profitable. I’m working on de-cluttering. Working out and meditating are top priority. As long as I’m going to be here I don’t want to suffer any more than necessary. But, I’m seriously homesick. I’ve never felt quite right in this world. There has always been a sense of loneliness and separation. I’ve never understood the wars and the racism and the sexism and the back-biting and the greed. I had several years where I was pretty well settled in. Now, I see the world again for what it is and I’m ready to let it go.
