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"Why?" You Ask?

Today's essay is inspired by Jane, an occasional commenter on my site. In response to Monday's essay (more of a brief pair of sentences, actually), she wrote:

"Why don't you get help?
Seriously.......why don't you?
jane | 11.10.09 - 11:02 pm"

Hmm. A difficult question to answer. But, I shall give it a shot:

Do I experience bouts where I am enormously sad, perhaps depressed, perhaps despondant? Yes. Is it normal to feel this way? I do not know really how to define "normal" in regards to emotions. When I am in these pits of despair, I hate them and feel utterly lost and forlorn and without hope. I feel like all is lost in life. But doesn't everyone feel that way from time-to-time? Isn't life sometimes sad? I really do not know how to answer this question, but I often wonder if the various "sadnesses" I feel in my heart and soul are the same as other people experience, or if I am somehow "different" in a way that is clinical or problematic?

As many of my long-time readers know, I am very UNSUCCESSFUL in handling death. The most significant death I have lived through recently was the passage of my beautiful mother in March of 2007. There are many other deaths though that have impacted me including my wonderful father in 1994, a wonderful, creative niece who killed herself by suicide in 1994, my graduate research mentor/advisor in 1994, a wonderful uncle in 1994, a very close family friend in 1994. Also, there has been the death of another uncle (an additional father-figure to me and a friend and mentor) in 1999, a beautiful aunt in 2002, and a cousin in 2009.

Why do I mention them? I mention the above because I am not sure if I "deal" with these deaths in the "right" way or not. In reality, I seem to have two methods though which I "cope"... either I a) think about these wonderful people who are now gone and I am sad, and I think of my own looming mortality, and how there will very soon come a time when I will not be here with my family and I will be dead, in the same way all those people who loved me before are dead. In this framework, all of life seems bleak and sad, and difficult to focus on. Or, conversely, I adopt strategy b) where I ignore it all and try to blithely go about life without thinking about death, without thinking about my loved ones who are gone. Neither strategy is wholly effective, and yet I do not know of any other strategies to employ.

If I spend time in my mind (I am a professor, so I am used to thinking), I will inevitably begin to think again about the futility of it all, about how death is looming for all of us in truly only a moment of time. So, in the last few years, I have become less of a thinker, less of a reader, more of a person who just drifts from moment to moment. In some ways this has been helpful, for it keeps the harsh agony quelled a bit, but I do not know if it is effective in healing. But I also do not see any other alternative.

So, Jane, I really do not know. I do not know if there is anything that CAN help, nor do I know if I am any different from anyone else in this regard. I really do not know, and I am simply here, in a sea of inactivity and indecision and uncertainity.

PipeTobacco