November.
It's a word that used to mean cold weather and football. Turkey with gravy and boots.
Now it means darkness and gray. It means every time I write the date on a paper or make my agenda at work I am reminded. Reminded of that month last year and what it brought. The havoc it wreaked on my life and my spirit.
It is funny how the past year has played out. In fact, just reviewing my blog posts I have seen my transitions. Shock. Disbelief. Acceptance. Sadness. Courage. Bouts of recovery. More bumps in the road. More shock. Fear. Compulsion and delusion. Flashes of hope but mostly a numb march through my days.
And now I'm on the eve of November. For most of this summer and early fall I had convinced myself that I could somehow skip over November. Hell I thought I could just skip over all of the holiday season. But as the days become colder and the days shorter it's hitting home that November will come and I will have to FEEL every second of it. There isn't a distraction large enough to wipe away what November will bring.
And to make matters worse, I have been feeling a new "phase" in this process: something I call The Aftershock. For so long I was focused on making it to the "next step." In some cases it was going back to work or seeing friends for the first time after it all happened, in others it was making it through a surgery or a doctor's appointment.
Now all of that is over. The circle has come back around and there is no "next step," to focus on conquering. Now there is just... nothing. Nothing but me, my thoughts and ...November. My normal self would be thinking of ways to distract myself from this horrifying month but I am not my normal self. And I can't find Steelheart- she must be on vacation.
Instead of feeling relief that all the "hoops" have been jumped through, I am left feeling deflated and defeated. I feel almost worse-off now than I did in the couple months following November last year. The irony is not lost on me that I am having some kind of delayed response to it all. Sure, the earthquake that was November 8, 2012 wreaked epic destruction on my life, but the aftershock, the second wave, is hitting right about now. And on my Richter scale, this one's not far off from the original.
Perhaps it is because I thought that all the medical "hoops" I had to jump through would somehow wipe away the hurt in my heart. But last time I checked, no one took a scalpel or stitches and operated on my broken heart. It's not something you can fix with an operation or some R&R. It's a full blown War on Grief and you either man up or die trying.
Every time I think of November approaching I think of the old Wyclef (or was it the Fugees?) song "Gone til November." For some reason the tune to that song is in some way comforting. Except if I could change it, I would change the lyrics to "Gone through November." I'd like to just skip right over it. Take a calendar and snip that month right off.
But I can't. Because although the original earthquake was a full year ago, the aftershock is no joke. And I feel it shaking in my heart.
