(1/9) A Series of Loss

Everyone has a story.  Mine is not one profound moment that would normally draw people in but rather its a series of events. Small stepping stones leading me closer and closer until I finally decided to jump in.  2022 is a year I will always look back on with a dark haze over it.  It started right away on New Years day when I got the shocking news of a very dear coworker who had been murdered.  I had already been battling postpartum depression at the time and, in fact, had made it a new years resolution to battle the depression with diet and exercise.  Unfortunately after news like this diet and exercise take a back seat for a while.  I was thrown into a spiral of catastrophic anxiety.  I remember loading my boys into my father-in-laws car and watching them drive away with actual heart palpitations at the fear that I would never see them again.  Saying  goodbye to my husband as he went off to work might as well have been our final goodbye.  I was lost in the idea that nobody is safe from sudden death.  Two months later, almost as if this anxiety of mine needed a refresher, my uncle died in his sleep.  I heard the words on the phone but just couldn’t wrap my head around them.  How could this be? He was healthy and we had just seen him last Thanksgiving.  “It doesn’t make sense” was all I kept saying. I was terrified of who would be next.  A little more time had passed and the pain of those two losses lingered but I was able to move forward until I received my final blow; my cousin.

When I saw my mother standing in the doorway at 9:00 at night a hot rush flooded my body. Starting in my heart and spreading to my extremities. I heard myself asking what happened. I was told to sit down. I saw my mothers lips moving and the name John Paul. The air left my lungs when the news set in. Cyanide. He was gone.

I let my mother hug me for a moment but pulled away because curling into a ball was the only thing that felt right. Every muscle wanted to be contracting to lessen the pain. I gripped the couch just to have something to squeeze.
The thing I was afraid of for the past decade had happened. How is this happening? Didn’t he just send me a funny Snapchat the other day? Why would he do this? HE did it. It wasn’t something that happened to him.
None of that mattered now.
The fact now was it happened. The only way through this now was forward.