Dear Woman I Never Knew

I don't know what to say to you except perhaps well, you got out. Sure you had to die to do so, but on some level I have come to see your passing as a kind of mercy, a severe one, but a mercy nonetheless. I've supposedly gotten out but alas it doesn't end. Your son, the one I was tethered to all those years, well it just doesn't matter that I moved away to escape, he continues to entangle me. And this, this is the sticking point. I've certainly thought about death, more as a means to escape than anything else. I don't necessarily want to die, its just I'm so tired of the endlessness of the emotional and psychological abuse. Hope as it turns out seems to be a terrible thing. For in spite of all the terrible things he has done to me over and over again, my brain stubbornly refuses to comprehend that someone like him can exist entirely without any compassion or empathy. He grows worse by the day. And in spite of me losing almost everything, he wants to suck more life out of me like a dementor. Why? He has already won a million fold over and over. He now has my children full time. Even still he wants to take more. He bullies. He stabs. He wishes me harm. All that to say, your murderer (your ex) whom fathered this thing that I was tethered to for so long, in so fathering spawned another alien just as his father spawned him. I wish I could say that your tragic death changed him--that he was able to rise above it and break the cycle of narcissist creating more narcissicism. But, I have no such news to write you. I fear for my children. I am hoping and praying that in spite of my not being able to be in proximity to them that they will somehow see through all these narcissistic enchantments and mirrors. I am hoping that I have somehow burdened them with overpowering tools that help them separate wheat from chaff, truth from lie. I pray that the narcissistic propaganda does not penetrate their spirits and souls. I pray that they hold onto compassion, empathy, hope, and kindness toward humanity and that they begin to recognize that there are things in proximity to them that are more alien than human. I'm so sorry that I failed you. When I first met him, I only wanted our relationship to be a source of healing from all of this shit for him. It still grieves me that he ultimately chose this path. They say that the narcissist cannot ever recover. But, alas I am cursed with microscopic hope that somehow this new mother figure in his life will somehow trigger healing in spite of the damning odds. And regardless of what happens with your son, I am hoping that the pattern ends with him. 

This is Complicated Grieving

Complication number one. He's not dead. There is no body in the ground with a stone above it. No way for outsiders to recognize that he is as good as dead. The soul went and flew itself away up to heaven or hell or where-ever souls abandon themselves to when those who own them do not take them seriously.

Complication number two. He's not even aware he is dead. Due to complication number one, perhaps because he's not physically dead. But he is very much dead on most every other level. Kind of like the walking dead. Kind of like a Bruce Willis character in the Sixth Sense. Going through the motions of living, but not really there. Hanging around. Haunting the living. Pretending.

Complication number three. His tentacles entangle little people you love--people who aren't dead. Little people who are very much trying to learn how best to live life deeply and passionately from someone who is mostly dead. And right now they have only this example of a dead man walking, ever pretending to be one of the living. And due to complication number two, the lack of awareness factor, they have to live a life amongst the dead.

So there you have it. The complicated parts. Kind of like an open wound of an unsolved murder case where they never found a body. You know you ought get on with your life except that you lack the closure you think you'd gain with the finding of a body. The closure you think you'd gain is just beyond the reach of the grave you don't have. Oh, and there's that ex zombie walking around causing trauma. And maybe this is why you sometimes wish for the closure his death would bring. This is complicated grieving.

On Grieving the What Mights

Sometimes the most tragic piece punches me unexpectedly in the gut. You'd think after all the abuse, all the hell in trying to escape the narcissist that in escape there would be only relief. But there is a hidden sadness that can sneak up behind you. You mistakenly think, if I can just get the hell out... If I can just survive and move on.... Why then I'll be fine.

And then there you go imagining like you've always done. Thinking of what might have been, if he'd only been able to choose something different. Just when you think you're finished with all the drama, all the death, all the grief and endings of dead relationships. There is a little spot that gets in.

Call it the what-might-have-been grief.

After you've invested so many years trying to love someone who for all intensive purposes can not ever love you back, you've come to intimately know the good friend of what-might-be. For many years, what-might-be has been one of your steadiest companions. What-might-be has been your hope, your citadel. And then what-might-be flies away into the air, evaporated just like everything else.

And this can be completely ungrounding. Cause who thinks of grieving the loss of the shared dreams, the future, the hopes of the growth, the butterfly transformation. But, you've lost so much. Why not this, too? After all, the snake goes on as perpetual death and life cycle.

Snake Eyes

If only I could erase the tree of knowledge that came from that look. The look that I perpetually go back to. The look that instagrammed the relationship into one cohesive picture for all parts of me to observe.

That split second that almost seemed to bleed all moments of the past 20 years into one.

Somehow in that look my destiny juxtaposed the Red-Seas-of-my-Egyptian-escapism versus the-slavery-isn't-so-bad bit next to one another. And in that moment, my escape route was hatched. Right down the middle of the walled off sea. The look that was able to break through into my own deluded mind, causing some sort of contrecoup injury to my jostled brain.

I might be choosing a drowning death of the Sea by leaving.

But those frozen far off eyes told me of another death. It wasn't the one I had always thought. It wasn't the pat answer I thought. I realized there must have been a soul murdering way back in the past. For those eyes stared out of a body that had no soul.  

That frozen framed moment crystallized "the why" so that I could mount the courage to enter the threatening Sea that might drown me. The why for how to choose your own death.

That look revealed my real choice was caught in the space between the slow agonizing death of my soul or the accidental death in my escape in crossing the Sea.

The relationship was already dead. There was no resurrection of it. I was holding up a giant empty shell and though already dead, my holding it threatened to kill me--my soul. I had to stab the shell, in order to live or die more authentically.

I looked into the eyes of my own death dream and I vowed that dying in the act of soul preservation was indeed the sort of death worth living your whole life for. And so I stabbed the giant snake.