Easier said than done. How do you pick up the slivered pieces of your heart, your mind, your life, and keep going? How can anyone continue when everything they knew was just destroyed? The hardest part now is trying to find meaning in the rest of my life. I don't just want to keep plodding along in the same dead end jobs with no drive. I don't want whatever talent I have to be wasted or bottled up inside because I'm afraid to let it out. I'm even bored/disgusted with writing half the time - I start the day busy and just end up surfing the internet for hours, ignoring everything else and letting the grief and anger and pain and isolation consume me again.
Before this I was going to take the full 3 months (12 weeks) of allotted FMLA time to search vigorously for a new job. Now, with only 4 weeks left of my 8 week leave, I have no idea what to do. I have to enroll in classes to continue receiving the loan (which I didn't get in the fall for no explained reason) but I don't know what I'm going to do education wise. Hardly anything piques my interest, or if it does, it's soon pushed aside by hyper-rationalism - "you'll never finish that, you'll get bored with it, you don't have time/energy/brains enough for that." Self-defeating always, that was me. But at least I was going to have her - I was going to have a little piece of perfect heaven here with me, something pure and good and borne out of the love my husband and I have for each other. And that was ripped away from me, too.
The things I used to enjoy grow sour. To borrow a quote from Game of Thrones - "A day will come when you think yourself safe and happy, and suddenly your joy will turn to ashes in your mouth..." Food has no taste, projects no allure, words no meaning beyond a trite sentiment. Nothing fits, the situation or me. I can't sit at home for the rest of my life, but I don't want the rest of my life to be lived in a haze of doing things for the sake of having something to do. I can keep myself busy with the best of them, but it's got to have meaning for me to feel accomplished.
One of my favorite things was making projects for my baby girl - I had never sewn a quilt, but I gave it a go. I spent hours searching eBay for the perfect yellow rug, the perfect crib skirt, the perfect bedding set. I sewed a new lampshade after making her father replace two light fixtures that weren't "perfect". Painting, sewing, crafting, gluing - these things were filled with purpose, because they were being done for her. Had she lived, I know she wouldn't have been cognizant enough to even recognize these things for a few years, let alone appreciate the time and effort that went into hand-crafting them. But that didn't matter, because they were for her - and she deserved the best.
I read stories about women getting second winds, new bursts of energy and hobbies that reignite that spark within them. Mine was dying before she came, and I feel like the last of it died with her. She was my inspiration and my hope, my new beginning and my finest hour. I only go on because there is nothing else to do - nothing I do now will bring her back, not the photos, not the keepsakes, not even the memory. Nothing will put her here in my arms again. Anything new that I do is going to be done without her. I didn't think a person could feel this empty, this lost and this hopeless.
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