The Biting Truth of the Bottom LIne

...my entry tonight is a lame cut & paste from an email response I sent to an inquiring acquaintance. I'd sent her (along with many others) the info on Anne's legacy page with the Trisomy Foundation--99% of those family & "friends" I contacted never even bothered to email me back or sign Anne's guestbook. I was shocked to hear from this one acquaintence. I got the typical, "so how've you been..."-- To candy coat my reality to spare her any discomfort (in light of the fact that she's all but vanished during my darkest hours of anguish) seemed so futile and dishonorable to the reality of my existence....

And not much for me. Tax season has kicked me hard. Last year we had Anne as a dependent; this year not. It's like it's so final. Plus DS is no longer eligible to be a dependent, so for the first time in over twenty years, DH & I filed just the two of us. It's been so hard. Not to mention I'm in the throws of the season of Anne--she would have turned two on the 28th. Now until we commemorate her burial just before my birthday in July tends to wreck havoc on my heart. The weather and spring flowers bring back vivid memories of her being here with us. My mind can't help but travel down the corridors of my memory in an attempt to recapture the final weeks of pgcy, and the two wonderful months we got to have with her before she died. I get out of bed each day and tend to my duties, but inside I'm a corpse. I cry every day for missing them.

Unfortunately, I had so much criticism to "get some help" that I finally gave in and started an anti-depressant. What my ignorant "advisors" failed to understand was that I'd been working closely with my dr on the whole A/D subject. In light of my peri-menopausal diabetes issues, we both agreed that it would be better if I held off on A/D use until I'd at least worked through the biggest parts of grieving. After all, grief in such circumstances is VERY natural, and to medicate it away with medicines that can have harsh side effects isn't necessarily the right route for everyone. But the blackness wasn't getting much brighter and those IRL who judge & criticize more than they support finally pushed me to give the A/D a go. It's an older A/D that they prescribe for fibromyalgia, PTSD, chronic fatigue/pain and sleep disorders.

I don't know if it's helping or not--it's a pretty raw season on the grieving time table right now, so I could overdose on Happy Pills and still be pretty depressed. I'm rather convinced that there really is no magic pill to make this "go away"--let's face it; it doesn't go away--all I can hope to do is get better at enduring it. We find things to busy ourselves so we can take our minds off it a little bit, but it's always a smothering force in our lives. Time has to run it's course, and what most people don't get is that there isn't enough time on the planet to "get over" putting two babies in the cemetery. Plus, with only three years into it since my first baby died, I'm still in the pre-school stages of being better at coping. It doesn't help when family support just plain sucks; all my friends have totally evaporated into thin air; those who are left are quick to dismiss the life-altering impact we've endured, and to top it all off my health has started heading south in no small way...