No rest for the weary

Well, I'm awake again.  Slapped in the face with harsh unforgiving reality.

Last night I forgot to take the Ambien, but I felt pretty tired and assumed nature would just take its course.  I was, of course, sorely mistaken.  The traumatic events were broadcast in high-def right in front of my face for several hours, leaving me bawling, shaking on the floor of the closet until Matt found me at 1 am.  I'd heard of mothers wailing for their lost children, but never experienced it until then - I know now why it happens.  We wail, we tear our hair, we cry out with a ferocious fury because nothing is bringing our children back to us, and there are no words in any language to accurately describe the anguish and torment that terrible knowledge brings.

You don't go through "stages" of grief - they hit you all at once, and often out of nowhere.  I am simultaneously furiously angry and devastated beyond words.  I have the frustration of a thousand speechless orphans, and the hopelessness of a million barren mothers.  I have the desire to punch something until my nails rip back and my knuckles are left raw and bloody, and I have no energy to crawl out from under the covers.

It isn't fair that this doesn't kill you.  It isn't fair that every day I wake up, take a breath, and live it all over again.  Pain this deep for this long should destroy someone.  It doesn't make me stronger because I'm "getting through it".  It rips apart the already fraying fabric of my soul and incinerates the shattered remnants of my heart with a freezing blaze.

In researching, I think I'm suffering from PTSD.  This is without a doubt the most traumatic event that has ever happened in my life, and it feels like it's still happening.  The nightmares come during the day and I don't just remember, I relive the horrific events over and over and over - always with the same outcome: helplessness, hopelessness, delivering my dead daughter and sobbing for her to forgive me.  Then the guilt comes in, and I hate myself - I hate that I'm still awake, alive, forced to suffer through each day with this overwhelming melancholy, these empty arms and womb, this useless, wasted life.  I'm terrified to live.