Sunday, April 8, 2018

My Side of the Bed and Its Nightstand

In four days, it will be a year since my brother's suicide.  I feel as though I've written every drop of grief out of it, but there is always more.  As the day approaches, my mood has understandably fallen.  I'm staying in bed during the weekends and crying more.  I torture myself with songs that will be forever associated with a year ago.

I once wrote a blog about The Babadook movie, in which grief takes the form of a monster and stalks a mother and child.  My own babadook haunted one section of my couch and my side of the bed.  The monster has thankfully left my couch but returns to my bed often.  Yesterday, I noticed something else about my side of the bed.  The nightstand is overflowing with stuff - books, a lamp, my eye glasses, a bowl of nail polishes, a canvas basket of junk with no other place, and two other items that are perpetual concrete representations of my life as it is now.

The first item is a large plastic mixing bowl, which has been there for a few years now.  It is Trent's vomit bowl.  He sleeps with me every night, and I never know when he will vomit.  It is reflux, post nasal drip, and the weird predisposition to get an upset stomach in the middle of the night.  So I keep a bowl nearby and when I awaken from the sound of him swallowing hard, I turn on the lamp and grab the bowl.  Making it to the toilet will likely never happen.

The second item is a box of kleenex.  Before Chad, I did not keep kleenex next to my bed unless I had a cold.  Even during depressive episodes, I made do without it, instead just bringing a few pieces of toilet paper with me to bed.  Chad's suicide, however, has made it a permanent fixture.  Poetically, it sits in Trent's vomit bowl, which sits on top of the canvas basket full of junk.  I have to replace the box every other month.   This is more poignant in my head than I can put into words.  While the babadook is a figurative representation of my grief, the kleenex is a physical one.  That it needs to be replaced is an analogy of the cycle of grief.  Even as others feel it is past time for me to stop needing the kleenex,  it is not that simple.  Time does lessen the acuteness, and maybe the box will need replacing less often, but for now, it is necessary.

I am going to try to stop writing about Chad.  I feel myself becoming stuck and writing about it seems to no longer provide catharsis.  These things are always so hard to end when hope is running low.