Venting thread that still excludes eddy (2)

[cunningham]

Tomorrow's my late husband's birthday. I'd planned to spend it with a friend who lost her husband the year before me (almost to the day), but she's cancelled (she had a funeral to go to). I don't want to be by myself but I also don't want to get together with just anyone. I know a lot of kind people but not many who know what it's like to lose a spouse and who I can just be with without it being awkward.

There are MeetUp groups for widowers...I know you said you didn't want to be with just anyone but why not?

My boyfriend's birthday is tomorrow too...

[linguoboy]

Tomorrow's my late husband's birthday. I'd planned to spend it with a friend who lost her husband the year before me (almost to the day), but she's cancelled (she had a funeral to go to). I don't want to be by myself but I also don't want to get together with just anyone. I know a lot of kind people but not many who know what it's like to lose a spouse and who I can just be with without it being awkward.

There are MeetUp groups for widowers...I know you said you didn't want to be with just anyone but why not?

Because even among widows and widowers, our experiences are very different. I belong to an LGBTQ group already and one of the issues I have is that most of the members seem to be religious or at least "spiritual". People have posted about using mediums to contact their deceased loved ones, for instance. This has nothing in common with my viewpoint at all, so their attempts to console me by talking about the presence of my late husband's "spirit" not only don't help, they actively annoy me.

[Travis B.]

I don't know what is going to be done with my meds at this point. Last Thursday through Sunday showed that I can definitely become very paranoid even on the meds that I am on. And I don't think my psych will increase the risperidone, since I get EPS at higher doses even with benztropine. And I am not confident that more cariprazine will do much good psychosis-wise. So that leaves changing one of the antipsychotics altogether (I don't think she will add another except as part of a crosstaper). And I am not happy with that possibility, because the last crosstaper I did was a disaster (but that was probably due to cariprazine not helping much with psychosis). I suspect if she does switch out a med it will be switching one or the other with olanzapine, which should be very effective, but has a scary side effect profile. Anyways, I don't know what will happen; in the very least I don't want her to do nothing, but I have a suspicion that very well may, considering she has not always attempted to add more meds in response to short bursts of more intense psychosis.

[Imralu]

I'd planned to spend it with a friend who lost her husband the year before me (almost to the day), but she's cancelled (she had a funeral to go to).

Oh dear. That's a pretty dire reason to cancel something like that.

People have posted about using mediums to contact their deceased loved ones, for instance. This has nothing in common with my viewpoint at all, so their attempts to console me by talking about the presence of my late husband's "spirit" not only don't help, they actively annoy me.

Yeesh! Yeah, I've opened up to people before about my life and then found that when they (a) suggest I try astral projection or (b) tell me they will cast a (beneficial) spell for me, I not only don't know what to say back, I also feel like all the nice bits about connecting with someone who listens and seems to understand are instantly gone.

More: show

(In healing from my breakdown, I went through a bit of a phase of telling my life story to near strangers who, I came to understand in talking with my counsellor, regarded my openness as the sign of me opening the door to a close friendship, which I then found overwhelming, especially when I realised that I had given someone I knew very little about, essentially some kind of power over me. It wasn't a token of friendship or trust, to me, as much as it was simply a sign that I had 20 years of pent up stuff that I had only just started to process and I was tired of lying or glossing over my past or me being the one who feels awkward when asked a question that doesn't have a nice answer suitable for polite conversation. If someone can't handle the answer, they shouldn't ask the question, so at some point I just started telling the truth ... it would just flow out of me and people tend to keep asking questions because they feel like arseholes to just let it trail off ... "So if you don't have a job, how do you spend your days?" "Hmm, mostly crying on my futon in the dark!" "Oh ..." ... and that's how I ended up with an eccentric old intellectual alcoholic urging me to fly back to Australia to kill my father and leaning in conspiratorially and sounding very eager to help me cover it up. Um!? He then told me I should drop in to his place for dinner whenever. Um ... no? There are some very strange people around!)

Like, I try to tell myself "This is a human who does genuinely care about me, and their beliefs about how stuff work shouldn't be important for feeling the empathy flowing out of them!" but for some reason, it's pretty important ... I guess because any time I open up to them again, I risk triggering a bizarre conversation metaphysics where the insinuation, even if it's not said out loud, is always that I'm being too closed minded. Sometimes I think I literally just want to have someone to cry on who will not say anything at all, just be there and hold me so I'm not crying alone. I think with grief, this is complicated by the fact that your brain is trying to get used to the idea that someone is no longer, and then you have someone who thinks that the best way to support you is to convince you of the idea that that's not true.

Hope the day is not being too hard on you and you're feeling OK *hug*

Also, Travis, I don't really have anything to say except I'm really hoping for some improvement for you, and *hug*

[Travis B.]

Also, Travis, I don't really have anything to say except I'm really hoping for some improvement for you, and *hug*

Things have definitely gotten better - but my psych seems to say basically that I should try to tolerate some level of psychotic symptoms through things taught in therapy - whereas I want no psychotic symptoms rather than to merely tolerate them, especially since I remember a time not that long ago when I had no psychotic symptoms at all. And if this can happen on the meds I am on, it can happen again on the meds that I am on, and I don't want to do this again, because that was a pretty awful few days.

[Vijay]

I belong to an LGBTQ group already and one of the issues I have is that most of the members seem to be religious or at least "spiritual". People have posted about using mediums to contact their deceased loved ones, for instance. This has nothing in common with my viewpoint at all, so their attempts to console me by talking about the presence of my late husband's "spirit" not only don't help, they actively annoy me.

My mom has tried going to prayer meetings a few times because so many of her friends and relatives are churchgoing Christians, but she always got sick of them and stopped for similar reasons. My whole family deals with religious pressure and things like this often enough that we just make fun of it (mostly, though not entirely, in private) whenever it happens.

[linguoboy]

Hope the day is not being too hard on you and you're feeling OK *hug*

Aw, thanks!

After much debate, I decided to just head home and tough it out. Then my brother, who's spending a week in St Louis to help take care of our father while his wife is in rehab, called me to vent about his terrible time there and we ended up having a really enjoyable conversation.

Now if I didn't have this awful reflux from the snakebite I had at lunch, I'd be doing okay right now.

[alice]

Something rather more banal: parking charges in the Lake District are ridiculous, very few machines take the shiny new £1 coins, and so very few shops actually have any of the old ones. Don't you just love this country?

[finlay]

gives you a good excuse not to pay the parking fee

[Risla]

So tonight I was just sitting in a park trying to eat some sherbet and a goddamn mukade marches up to me. Wasn't a big one (three or four inches?) but still. Nooooo thaaaanks. The giant bugs in this country are terrifying. I'm also not looking forward to more encounters with suzumebachi this summer (I've met them in abundance on the bicycle path I otherwise like the last two summers).

[linguoboy]

Something rather more banal: parking charges in the Lake District are ridiculous, very few machines take the shiny new £1 coins, and so very few shops actually have any of the old ones. Don't you just love this country?

Have you had one of the new £2 coins fall apart on you yet?

[alice]

Something rather more banal: parking charges in the Lake District are ridiculous, very few machines take the shiny new £1 coins, and so very few shops actually have any of the old ones. Don't you just love this country?

Have you had one of the new £2 coins fall apart on you yet?

Not yet. But I did once have one of the old £2 coins come apart; inside it was a 2p piece. A genuine counterfeit!

[alice]

The giant bugs in this country are terrifying.

Warning: extremely lame joke follows:

That's nothing; you should see the software I write!

[Salmoneus]

Tomorrow's my late husband's birthday. I'd planned to spend it with a friend who lost her husband the year before me (almost to the day), but she's cancelled (she had a funeral to go to). I don't want to be by myself but I also don't want to get together with just anyone. I know a lot of kind people but not many who know what it's like to lose a spouse and who I can just be with without it being awkward.

There are MeetUp groups for widowers...I know you said you didn't want to be with just anyone but why not?

Because even among widows and widowers, our experiences are very different. I belong to an LGBTQ group already and one of the issues I have is that most of the members seem to be religious or at least "spiritual". People have posted about using mediums to contact their deceased loved ones, for instance. This has nothing in common with my viewpoint at all, so their attempts to console me by talking about the presence of my late husband's "spirit" not only don't help, they actively annoy me.

My sympathies. Someone close to me was bereaved a bit over a year ago, so I've gotten to see a lot of what follows, if only from the outside. They'd seem to be doing better until a birthday or an anniversary or a holiday came along and they'd be dropped right back in it. I hope you're doing okay. If it's any consolation, I think it's the first anniversary of everything that's the worst.

One positive thing the person I know did was to have a sort of small private ceremony about a year later, after the first of everything - for scattering the ashes. I think they put it off so long just because they couldn't face it any earlier, but it actually worked out pretty well - I think it's had a sort of closure effect, like it's the end of the initial mourning process. [There was probably a lot to be said for the old official mourning periods, in terms of giving people permission to grieve, but also giving them a sense of closure after a period].
(I think this may be one benefit of cremation. My grandparents were cremated and had separate interment ceremonies, and I think that the two-stage process is probably psychologically helpful. As is the old Catholic tradition of immediate funerals - that way they can be held while everyone's still in shock, before they can become A Big Thing to dread.)

Sorry, getting a bit morbid there; that's probably not what you need right now...

[Salmoneus]

Regarding the irritations of spiritualism: I think, as Imralu suggests, there's something frustrating about trying to do something hard, like coming to terms with something awful, only to be told it's unnecessary. Oh, don't worry, they say, everything's fine, honestly! Nothing bad has happened here! Just think happy thoughts! If we don't acknowledge the unpleasant realities, nothing can hurt us!
...yeah.

For some reason, despite how fashionable it is to mock traditional religions for giving people crutches and for teaching them to deny reality, I actually find this happens much more with the "not religious, just spiritual" crowd. The religious may say that, oh, but they're in heaven now, but they don't really expect that to convince anyone that it's all OK. They can see the logical and emotional gaps there and offer it more as a source of hope than as a source of genuine reassurance. Whereas the people who believe in ghosts and dream spirits and whatnot, they think it's all scientific and immediate and can't understand why this doesn't make your problems go away...



alice: fortunately, you don't really need a car in the lake district, or at least not in the areas where there are parking charges. That's what walking's for! Plus, the great bus service.
(What part have you been in?)

[Risla]

The giant bugs in this country are terrifying.

Warning: extremely lame joke follows:

That's nothing; you should see the software I write!

Ha ha ha. I work for an IT company and encounter a fair amount of those bugs too.

[Travis B.]

Almost everything I do at work involves fixing or investigating bugs, aka SPRs (software problem reports).

[linguoboy]

My sympathies. Someone close to me was bereaved a bit over a year ago, so I've gotten to see a lot of what follows, if only from the outside. They'd seem to be doing better until a birthday or an anniversary or a holiday came along and they'd be dropped right back in it. I hope you're doing okay. If it's any consolation, I think it's the first anniversary of everything that's the worst.

That seems logical--if you've gotten through it once, naturally you can do it again, right? But every anniversary is different. There's a lot else going on in your life that can affect your reactions. (I've been joking that my parents have to hold off dying for at least a year, since I don't think I could fend off another blow so soon.) And--as Patton Oswalt has observed--grief is insidious. You think you know when it's going to strike, so you steel yourself for those moments. And so it finds another way in. (Oswalt tells the story of being reduced to sobs by finding an old text message. I've had a similar experience--but not with an old text message, because he warned me about that one.)

One positive thing the person I know did was to have a sort of small private ceremony about a year later, after the first of everything - for scattering the ashes. I think they put it off so long just because they couldn't face it any earlier, but it actually worked out pretty well - I think it's had a sort of closure effect, like it's the end of the initial mourning process.

I did feel some closure after the scattering ceremony. (We did it on the 99th day after death so there was at least a chance the weather wouldn't be godawful.) But then over the past month I've gotten fragile again. I thought it might be because of anniversaries (not just his birthday but also of the two surgeries which eventually led to his demise), but I won't really know until I'm over it.

I'm kind of a morbid person in general so morbidity doesn't really bother me.

I think the reason the spiritual reassurance gets under my skin is that I joined the group for some concrete advice and support: What practical things do I need to accomplish and how? What do you wish someone had told you when you were dealing with the funeral, with service providers, with work, with family, etc.? (I've gotten some terrific advice in all those areas from widows I know locally.) How do I know when my situation depression is becoming chronic? But, no, it's mostly pictures of sunsets and convos about how you tell whether your spirit medium is legit or not. [ProTip: They're all fake.]

It's also bothersome to see people who seem stuck and I don't know why. Latent fear I'll end up like that? As you guys say, I'm putting hard effort into dealing with the fact that dead is dead and all this fingers-in-the-ears horseshit about how you talk to your husband in the car and you know he hears you because sometimes the lights change at just! the! right! time! is irritating, even if it is metaphorical.

[alice]

alice: fortunately, you don't really need a car in the lake district, or at least not in the areas where there are parking charges. That's what walking's for! Plus, the great bus service.
(What part have you been in?)

Ideally. But when many of the places you or your partner wants to go aren't reachable by bus, and when for medical reasons you can't realistically do too much walking or travelling by bus anyway, a car is essential.

Since you ask, we stayed about two miles from Hawkshead; it was our seventh visit to the Lake District in total.

[Salmoneus]

alice: fortunately, you don't really need a car in the lake district, or at least not in the areas where there are parking charges. That's what walking's for! Plus, the great bus service.
(What part have you been in?)

Ideally. But when many of the places you or your partner wants to go aren't reachable by bus, and when for medical reasons you can't realistically do too much walking or travelling by bus anyway, a car is essential.

Ahh. Yes, I can see that going to the walking capital of the country and not being able to walk much would be frustrating.

It's been a while since I've used them so I can't be sure, but it might be worth looking online for... I was going to say private buses, but they're all private now. But I mean specifically smaller minibuses that aren't advertised at bus stops, but that are designed to bring hikers etc to more isolated places (it's hard for the real buses since so many of the minor roads up there aren't really suitable for them*). I remember them having been useful. But like I say, that was some time ago.

Since you ask, we stayed about two miles from Hawkshead; it was our seventh visit to the Lake District in total.

Oh right. Stayed in a cottage near there one time, although for some reason I can't remember it (I know I've stayed in two cottages in cumbria, but I can only remember the other one. Or possibly an amalgam of them both...). And possibly at a B&B in Hawkshead itself. I'm more familiar with the north, though.
[lots of family connections up there, on both sides of the family, although everyone's dead now.]

[Imralu]

But, no, it's mostly pictures of sunsets and convos about how you tell whether your spirit medium is legit or not. [ProTip: They're all fake.]

*clutches pearls* No! *gasp* But haven't you seen Ghost?

If you lived in Berlin I'd recommend the Schwulenberatung. Is there some sort of free counselling service near you where you could go and talk about these things? Like, those are very good questions that you have and while other widowed people have the personal experience to answer those questions, they can only really answer from their own experience ... and people are pretty different and also pretty fallible. They may genuinely believe that drinking ginseng tea and playing the nose flute every morning helped them when in reality, they simply needed time, the support of friends and the idea that they were doing something positive. A professional who's any good should be more familiar with the broader patterns of the paths people take with grief and may give you some tips and answers that match you and how you function a but better.

[Vijay]

It's also bothersome to see people who seem stuck and I don't know why. Latent fear I'll end up like that? As you guys say, I'm putting hard effort into dealing with the fact that dead is dead and all this fingers-in-the-ears horseshit about how you talk to your husband in the car and you know he hears you because sometimes the lights change at just! the! right! time! is irritating, even if it is metaphorical.

I'm curious: How familiar are you with cultural differences in conceptualizing death? I think it's one thing to simply deny death, but I find it more interesting that people have a wide variety of ways of responding to it. About a year ago, I learned a bit from National Geographic about the way the Toraja people of South Sulawesi deal with the death of a loved one, which seems to involve viewing death as a gradual process and more of a continuum rather than something that happens suddenly. Do you know about this, too?

[Travis B.]

All I am going to say about the last few days is things are getting somewhat scary now; even though things are better today, I have had two short but pretty severe delusional episodes in the span of two weeks, and who knows when I will have the next, or how bad it will be. (Of course, the irony is that things have gotten better between these episodes. I no longer am constantly paranoid, for instance.)

[jal]

All I am going to say about the last few days is things are getting somewhat scary now; even though things are better today

All I can think of saying in response, is a sad smiley :(. I hope you pull through!


JAL

[finlay]

I have three days off next week. But it's probably going to rain according to my weather app. There go my camping plans. I mean I could still try and go... it's just not going to be the nicest of days for it. Ugh. I guess Japan's weather, despite climate change, is still predictable enough that I should have known that it'd be the beginning of the rainy season. But I basically have to book days off a month in advance, so it's impossible to predict what the weather will be like. I guess I could like, go somewhere else? I dunno, I don't really have the impetus at the moment.

I would have gone camping last month but I'm still getting over this fucking shoulder injury I got back in fucking February skiing, and I've been going to the physio pretty much every week. I've finally got most of my range of motion back although it's not completely healed and the muscles are still all stiff.