Caregiver's Guilt

It's been just a little over a year since Jane committed suicide. There was no escaping the anniversary of that event. I thought about a great many things that I have struggled with throughout this past year, and had come to terms with. But, something was still bothering me, so much so that I had pushed it aside, out of mind and into the realm of repression and denial I suppose. Those kinds of defense mechanisms do serve a purpose, and there are only so many emotions a person can deal with at a time, but eventually they have to be faced.

If not, then your “inner being” has a way of sending you messages.

I finally started listening.

There is a lot of guilt to deal with when someone very close to you commits suicide. My family, Jane’s family, my friends and colleagues all know how devoted I was to Jane. Because of her medical condition I always had a lot on my plate: full time job, cooking, household chores/repairs, errands etc. (I sure developed respect for the women in our society who do the same thing.)

I never felt as though it was a burden. I loved doing things for Jane. It made me feel good. But, it didn’t make her feel good. She always felt as though she was a burden on me, no matter how much I tried to convince her otherwise. She would struggle before asking me to do something as simple as going to pick up a prescription for her. That irritated me, well frustrated me at times, which only made things more difficult for her.

When she died, there was a huge “burden” and responsibility lifted off my shoulders. There was a sense of relief and freedom. And it made me feel absolutely miserable. That’s what “caregiver’s guilt” is all about.

But that guilt ran even deeper.

Despite my full plate as a “caregiver” (I don’t really like that term, I prefer “loving husband”) I still found time for my own interests. I love music, art, reading, studying, and over the past 10 years, “inner exploration” and the mysteries of human “awakening”. Jane didn’t really share those interests, although we had many discussions in these areas, especially lucid dreaming. I don’t think she read this blog much. And, I always felt a little guilty about the time I spent with my internet friends and community. I should have spent more time working on my honey “do” list, and I often felt as though Jane thought the same thing.

So for the past year I have had the freedom to play my guitar, draw, read, or blog to my heart’s content, but I have not done any of those things. I have developed other interests, but when it comes to the things that I used to love, I haven’t been able to do a damn thing. In fact, I would sometimes feel physically sick when I tried, and had no idea why.

Of course I really knew why, and have known all along.

So, I’m trying to get my toes wet.

To be continued….. eventually…..

The 2005 index

When I started this blog I made a mind map of the various influences that had happened over the previous 10 years as a list of topics I wanted to blog about. Many of the influences occurred and reoccurred, but in different ways. I hope to re-organize my blog in 2007 to reflect this.

I created this index at the end of 2005:
(Technical Note: I can’t figure out how to get rid of the blank lines under the mind map. For every clickable link in the mind map, a blank line shows up below it)

Solar Cycles

I’ve had this idea simmering of how I want to organize my My 124857 Work blog in a manner that integrates my past, present, and future in more of a non-linear time sequence flow. One that more closely symbolizes my thinking processes, practices, differentiations, and unfoldings. I like the idea of using one solar year as my reference point, and decided to use Dec 21 as the starting reference point.

I’ve always thought of point 9, or point 0, on the Enneagram as simultaneously symbolizing both the beginning and the end. But with the end integrating the previous beginning at a new level.

Good Grief

Good Grief!? I have no idea where a phrase like that might have come from. I have a difficult time imagining that a person could actually have good grief. But then I think how some people might lose someone close to them and have no friends, family, or support to turn to. I guess that might make my grief “good” relative to their grief, since I do have a lot of support. But when someone very close to you dies, I have a hard time seeing anything good about it. All the support in the world doesn’t change that one fact…. i.e. for me, I no longer have my best friend and lover to share things with.

She is dead.

I have come to think of my grief like vomiting when you have a stomach malady. I’ll lay in bed feeling like I might start crying, but I’ve cried so much that I don’t want to cry any more. Just like the feeling I have when I need to throw up but I really don’t want to. So I’ll keep fighting it until suddenly I have to make a mad rush to the bathroom and puke my guts out. I hate that feeling of hanging over a toilet and heaving. But it feels so good afterwards. So I try to not cry, but finally just give in, and then I feel a little better…. For a while anyway. And the in between intervals keep gradually lengthening.

These days I have to deal with our culture’s “death avoidance” mentality. I’ve turned into a “death” leper. People avoid talking to me at work now. No one wants to talk about death. People seem to want to pity me, and offer condolences, but please don’t talk about death. It makes them uncomfortable. I really don’t blame them, because not too long ago I behaved the same way. I had no reference.

I have discovered that I now belong to a clique, a club. A club that no one wants to join. Membership just happens. But, a club that one person of nearly every couple in the world will gain unwanted membership in at some point during their lives.

I’ve found myself exploring the following aspects of human experience:

• Grief in general. The loss of someone close
• Caregiver guilt. Serving someone for many years
• Suicide. What if? If only….. Clues?
• Widower. Not anything like I’ve seen it portrayed on TV shows

When Jane died, I died. She physically died, and I died in other ways. No one seems to get it, except those who know the path I have just walked.

Jane ultimately gave me two gifts. I loved her like I have loved no one. Experiencing the joy of love together with her gave me the greatest gift of my life. Then Jane gave me the second gift, her death. A horrible gift that I did not want to have, but a gift none-the-less.

How can I call the death of someone I loved so much a gift? It sure doesn’t seem like it when I look at all the tears I have cried, and the horrible feelings of grief that just slam me up against a wall, and the utter alone feelings, and the silence, the never ending silence. I feel as though everything that mattered to me vanished, and all the “things” that used to matter to me, mean absolutely nothing to me anymore.

So what does matter? I think death does. I’ve considered that saying “Many paths, One truth” from a slightly different perspective. People arrive at death from many directions, but we all end up arriving at the same destination.

As a death leper, I realize that I have, to a certain extent, died before I died. What a shitty beautiful gift Jane gave me. I hope that I can use it wisely.

My Wife's Death

On Sept 27, 2006 my wife Jane committed suicide. My world changed forever. I have tried to practice mindfulness using breath awareness for a number of years now. Jane killed herself by denying herself life sustaining breath.

I did not truly understand the pain that Jane suffered. I could not take her perspective on life without my own filter, a filter in which suicide does not exist as an option. But it sure did for her, although she kept that option a secret.

I have experienced a myriad of feelings since this tragic event; guilt, sadness, anger, regrets, longing, despair.

But mostly, I just really miss her.

My Favorite Sufi

I really like the writings of Hazrat Inayat Khan. I consider him my favorite sufi. A lot of the little sayings I used in my transpersonal ads came from his writings.

(Mushtaq found this photo of him and posted it some time back)

I like his "The Art of Being and Becoming" the best.

STIME

I stumbled across the STIME site a while back and it made me think a little bit more about time and how we represent it. Seeing as I have a penchant for Enneagram layouts, the 24 hour day cycle presented me with some ideas about that. I figured three 8 hour segments in one day seemed good.

Where to start? midnight? daybreak? I finally decided that point 9 on the enneagram would represent the end of the day at the very moment I transition from the wake state to the sleep state.

About Breath

My attempts to “stay awake” by pausing to count out 10 breaths throughout the day have had limited success. The red entries still seem to outnumber the green entries. But I tend to keep an optimistic perspective on these things, and try to use the information to help develop strategies that might increase the frequency of those green 10x entry counts.

Mushtaq offered an interesting sufi-studies post on breath work a few years ago that he subsequently posted on his blog regarding the pathological types of breathing, drawing from the work of Scott Sonnon.

My mind map of the Scott Sonnon pathological breathing types:

(Click image to enlarge)

This gave me just what I needed to provide a shift in perspective on this activity. Instead of focusing on trying to just observe my breath, I started to focus on “how” I breathed. I started to realize that when I slipped into the “waking dream”, I could recall a breath pattern. Unfortunately, it seemed to happen before I could “think” about it. (Another clue dangling just beyond my reach).

Life Balancing

David Allen's Getting Things Done helped me develop a methodology for capturing all the "things" I wanted to do. It eliminated a certain kind of stress that had bulit up from having piles of papers, and e-mails, and projects, and feeling so overwhelmed at times that I just got stuck and ended up spinning my wheels more than getting myself organized.

So at this point I had finally captured everything in one very large to-do list, but I still had to deal with "prioritizing" the order in which I did things. I tried several different List Managers and ended up using one called Life Balance for several years. I only recently stopped using it.

I liked Life Balance because it had a balancing feature so that you could group your tasks into focus areas. My 142857 Work has 6 areas that I based on Ken Wilber's Big 3: It, We, and I.

The Life Balance software would give me a certain amount of credit for each task I completed. However, if I neglected tasks in certain groups, the priority for those tasks would rise.

That seemed good in theory, neglected areas of pursuit would push higher on the list, but in practice it just never seemed to work quite right.