I have a stupid amount of things to be grateful for, and for most of them I'm grateful with my whole heart, but there is an uglier kind of gratitude that plagues me this Thanksgiving.
I lost someone very dear to me this year, but for all of my personal pain, I feel like I can't show it as much. He wasn't my husband, my father or my son, my sibling or my best friend. What right do I have to be miserable?
But worse than that is the guilt of gratitude, because I can't help but be grateful that it wasn't my parent, or my sibling, or gods-forbid my husband.
My head says it's not wrong to be grateful that it wasn't me. But my heart calls my head a liar.
the loss of memory is perhaps the cruelest of tortures. the one who bears the scar feels not the wound, instead it is absorbed by those who love them.
ReplyDeleteto hear your life spun out before you as a fairytale half remembered as fiction. to greet your children half grown and filled with the memories of you that you no longer share.
the numbness in realizing you SHOULD feel something.. some glimmer some real emotion but all is frustration in knowing how you should and yet do not feel.
the oddest shuffle of what should be felt and by whom as ever I've seen. What right have we to mourn that which "never was"?
And yet as I look at my children with their brilliant smiles and twinkling wit I know that I could never volunteer to trade places.