Ain't no "Why"

It's been a month as of yesterday, and it's still unimaginable. It's way too real, while at the same time surreal. Folks say things like "It will get easier", but it doesn't seem to.

Someone wrote that "you're only ever as happy as your least happy child". OK, so if your only child was so unhappy that it overcame her, where does that leave us? Anita and I love each other more than anything, but we loved our daughter equally, and now we have this huge hole in ourselves.

I long ago realized that life consists of oscillating between problems and solutions, sorrow and joy, big and small. This is normal; the bad allows us to enjoy the good. We're all the product of this oscillation, and that's normal too. But this isn't a "problem" that we can solve, isn't a "problem" that can go away.

Someone close to Kt said to me, "I don't know how I'm supposed to act", and I knew exactly what he meant. He wasn't simply expressing the typical (if entirely reasonable) "I really don't know what I should say to you", he was honestly saying that he doesn't know how he's expected to carry on day-to-day life as it was before, because it isn't as it was before. And I didn't know what to say to him, because I don't either. I hear the same thing in my siblings' voices--they sound so lost, as we all are.

One of the things that you don't realize about grief until you're in it is how random it is, how trivial things can pull the scab off the wound and rip it wide open: a song on the radio that she loved; thinking you hear her downstairs in the kitchen (just the icemaker, sigh); a random sighting of something that makes you think, "I'll have to tell Kt...I mean, I would have told Kt...ah, ****" -- and you're bleeding again.

The title of this post speaks for itself, but also evokes the Kt song of the day (thanks Madz): Chaka Khan, "Ain't Nobody" ...I remember Kt boppin' out to this in the passenger seat of the minivan, with Madz and Yale and Mira in the back!