Grief and fibromyalgia 2.0

This is a post about nothing really.

I’ve been getting quieter and quieter.

I know.

And I’m sorry.

Since Mama Claire left for the next life I haven’t felt quite right. 

Sometimes I think about quitting blogging. Writing. Just about the last things I feel I have left. I’m just about managing to get to work.

Shattering grief

Life mostly feels dim. Very very dim.

I do have moments when I see or hear something beautiful and I marvel, if only for a second. But I always come back to the question I asked in my last post. What is it all for? What do I live for?

The other night I woke up talking in my sleep (as I do…better than sleepwalking any day). I’d mentioned my great aunty’s name – Aunty Girlsy who my Ma (my maternal grandmum who raised me with love) took me to see regularly. I woke up, in an instant remembered she too had departed recently and I burst into tears. For I moment I forgot. I forgot about Mama Claire (paternal grandma) and cried some more hysterically before drifting back off to sleep.

When I call my Ma in Trinidad, she often tells me about being washed over by sudden bouts of grief, for no known reason. My Grampie acknowledged this feeling too.

And I am not their age. Neither have I lived the lives they have. But I feel it too, my heart to theirs, I feel it. And it is shattering.

I think, that possibly this grief is triggering depression which I already live with. I always thought these thoughts. They are just now, more amplified. I am hoping that this will pass. Please, let it pass.

Flare ups

In the midst of all this I have been having the most unrelenting flare-up of fibromyalgia symptoms. A cold, sore throat  and ear pain that come and go, exhaustion that wears me out so, persistent migraines, sudden attacks of IBS flares that send me running to the loo and exacerbated insomnia that won’t let up. I am up through the night, jumpy, replete with horror, sleep terrors and terrifying hypnagogic hallucinations.  When I do drift away, it is always to a place of vivid dreams.

By the time I get to work, I am irritable, aching and moody. I cannot see the point of it all.

Last night I had a meltdown. I rang my aunty who cared for Mama Claire in her last ailing years, in a panic. Out of the blue, I remembered Mama Claire had a tattoo of a heart with an arrow through it on her hand. And then I was unsure, and panic set in, where the doubt settled. Dear God, it hasn’t been that long, how could I forget? I cannot forget! So I called my aunt to ask her. Yes, it was a heart with an arrow through it.

Is this the essence of grief? I’ve never felt whole, but Mama Claire’s passing has left me a little more fractured. Please, tell me, will it be so for the rest of my life? will more of me break away every time someone I love so much leaves me?

I am sorry this is so dark. But I have to tell you what is truly in my heart. As I write this, I am sitting on my bed watching a bouquet of daffodils slowly bloom. they were completely closed nine hours ago. Now five of them are opened. I return to despair and when I look up and see them I marvel again. Thank heaven for this beauty or I don’t know where I’d be.

I hope you are well, and loved, and seeing and feeling love in the world around you. As I always say, it is all that keeps me, and I hope you have some of that too.

Gentle hugs x

Photo by Fancycrave

Slider photo by Clever Visuals