One year ago today, a sweet, gentle, deep, caring person who struggled...whose soul needed to leave his broken mind, broken heart, broken body... He left us a year ago today. I believe he found peace, but am not sure if he knew he was irreplaceable too...
I wish so many thing went differently that day, that week, hell, that year (I know he loved his sister so much, I know loosing his dad suddenly at the age of 12 lived inside him for years...in ways none of us really knew. You can never know another's grief. Then to loose the sister he was closest to in age, the one I watched him grow up with, the one I loved too - you couldn't not love her, that wild, fun, sweet, laughter-inducing girl...to loose her too... that could tip the balance out of anyone's favor. Bipolar or not...).
I see him as someone whose humanity suffocated his soul and his soul needed to survive, to escape and in that moment, his humanity was too much, the battle too huge (at least in that moment, but sometimes, the moments win). His soul was not lost in that. At least, I try to believe...
And here, we will never feel quite the same, for a third time our world shifted - we don't quite fit, we don't quite recognize it - our souls feel his absence here and will always look back wishing we could have reached him - connected to him - helped him, given some relief, something to believe, anything so that he could stay...so that he would stay...
We lost someone so wonderful a year ago. And we had just lost his sister in May. He wrote, one day, quoted this song on his fb page... opened a little bit of his grief to the world;
"When you try your best, but you don't succeed
When you get what you want, but not what you need
When you feel so tired, but you can't sleep
Stuck in reverse
And the tears come streaming down your face
When you lose something you can't replace"
We loved him. But sometimes love fails. Ultimately, I hope not, but here in this world, sometimes it does.
A year ago, my husband and his sister caught up to him, only to see him laying awkwardly among some rocks below.
I remember the phone call from my husband. I remember where I was standing. I remember the sound of my husbands voice. It's all right there... that moment. Along with all the other moments that glued themselves into my mind from that year of such loss on top of loss...
In May, on the phone first I heard a doctor telling me about my baby, "her heart stopped..."
Later that day my husband recounted a message on his phone from his grandmother, "she fell off a cliff and I think she's dead." She was referring to my sister-in-law.
Then, on this day in October I would hear my husband tell me, "Winship committed suicide." Right aobut now, on a Wednesday morning, on a lovely fall day, at this hour I'm writing - it all happened...I got the call around 10:30. And it was over. He was gone.
Gone.
Another, irreplaceable life lost to us here...
It's been a long year...
"Tears stream, down your face"
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My husband recalls how his sister left his house to get him (my husband drove all night to get there and stayed at her house). She went to pick up my husband and make cinnamon rolls to bring to their brother. My husband feels like he backed his brother into a corner by driving down there - that he someone made his brother panic and decide to act... and I can't take that away - I know no one did the right thing or the wrong thing - but the picture gets painted with blame and regret when you see someone at the bottom of a cliff. I hate it all - I hate the hardness of each loss and the inevitable guilt and agony and perfect hindsight that tortures the mind - I hate loss, CHD, Bipolar, I hate cliff edges that steal people in various ways... I HATE it all. Good Lord there had better be a place of perfect rest and peace and something to absorb all this awfulness into a resolution that makes all this dissolve into nothingness... Cause this world is so awful, and it always will be - nothing here works or ever will. I hope to God they are all in a "better place" - God I hope so, they deserve it - for all the hell they were given here.
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Both my hudband and I found out that the other loved this song. So for today, this is what I'm posting, it fits:
Helplessness Blues
I don't know exactly just why I love this song...besides the title... but something about it, get's to me...it's happy/sad in every single moment - and that's where I live now.
I like this line the best:
"If I know only one thing, it's that everything that I see
Of the world outside is so inconceivable often I barely can speak
Yeah I'm tongue-tied and dizzy and I can't keep it to myself"
