Despite all my Rage

I don't know what exactly I expected when the death day passed. I know I still don't know what to call it, but that it is as distinct a day as her birthday is. What I didn't expect but what has happened is that I find that the suffocating sadness does lift at times, for moments. Unfortunately when it lifts it does not reveal happiness and joy. Instead it reveals unfocused anger and rage.

I spent the first year wondering about this "anger" stage of grieving, watching my husband clearly struggling against the anger with every fiber of his psyche and body and sometimes giving in to it. I rarely felt it. In the first months I felt very little, in the next months I felt like someone had wrapped sadness and despair around me like a blanket. What I didn't feel was anger.

But now. Now I wake up in the morning and when I remember that my beautiful light is gone I feel a fury roiling inside of me. I'm not angry with or at anyone. Just enraged. Not at the unfairness of it all. Just, enraged. It's a physical reaction, it makes me feel sick to my stomach and makes my chest feel tight and it just sits there with no hope of ever being dispersed because there is no one to be angry with, and even after a brief outburst it just comes back again like the next ocean wave. A regular force of nature, continuously swelling and breaking with no rest, no hope of ever breaking the cycle.

I envision punching things, walls, people. I envision throwing things through walls and breaking dishes or vases. I think that maybe I should join the boxing gym to try to channel this anger into something productive like loosing that 10 lbs the emotional eating has added to my body. But in the end I don't really think any of those things will stop the feelings from coming back, so I don't do them. Instead I just push through the pain. Try to keep moving even though the waves of rage come at me with a regular frequency. At least I am starting to get used to the roiling and feel less crazy than I did.

So far the second year is just as shitty as the first. Possibly worse. My psychic defense mechanisms are starting to break down. My brain is finally willing to admit defeat, admit that M really isn't coming back. My brain can see far enough down the road to know that not only am I going to live with the pain of this loss for my whole life that other people are going to forget or not know about it. The sheer length of time I have left on this earth is overwhelming.