Brave New Normal / Uncategorized

Veterans Day

/ Erica Herd / 6 Comments

johnsonsquare
(Google image – Johnson Square)

It’s Veteran’s Day, 2019. I am not a veteran.

The office is open. On my lunch hour, I go for a walk, hear the strains of drums and bagpipes on Broughton Street and an atonal siren that repeats and repeats. It sounds eerie, but it does not fill me with dread. I walk through Reynolds Square, down East Saint Julian Street and then to Johnson Square, where part of the original Cape Fear was filmed. So many squares.

The dissonant siren rises up again like a warning, but I am not afraid. I welcome and embrace it as part of who I am. This is me – off-key. After three years, I feel my feet finally making contact with the pavement on these Savannah streets, like I have never felt before. I am here. I am alive. I am not perfect or whole or healed, but I exist, and I am worthy. I am a part of this world. No one can tell me otherwise. I belong, somehow.

Something About Nothing

/ Erica Herd / 14 Comments

(google image)

I haven’t posted in almost three months because I feel I have nothing to say. Well, at least nothing I think people want to hear. Maybe it’s the result of living in a social media-based world, wanting to be more positive and feeling that writing about unsettling or unpleasing topics and feelings is ever so uncool.

In that vein, I thought I’d go ahead and post Something About Nothing. Like Seinfeld, the self-described TV show “about nothing.” But there is always something to be found in nothing. A silver lining to every dark cloud.

Sometimes I long to feel nothing, and sometimes my prayers are answered. My old friend Anhedonia creeps in, putting my feelings on ice, wrapping me up in a delicious blanket of numbness and don’t-give-a-damn. Merriam Webster defines anhedonia as “a psychological condition characterized by inability to experience pleasure in normally pleasurable acts.” This condition also makes you impervious to emotional pain, at least that’s how it works for me.

Nothing. The absence of something. The absence of stuff, baggage, fears, sadness, happiness, inhibitions, guilt. I’m riffing here.

On another note, grief is settling into my bones, becoming more a part of who I am,
not a negative, fearful thing. Merely a thing that exists, like the scar on my palm after I cut it on a cat food can. I’m a slow healer, so it will always be there.

I am making plans for this year, not resolutions, but plans. Resolutions is too strident a word for me.

Nothing is part of my plan. To let nothing stand in my way. To let nothing tear me apart. To let nothing and no one tell me who I am or what I can and cannot do. To enjoy the entirety of life and accept the love I receive without question, without trying to control it or judge it. To embrace life in all its nothingness and something-ness. To take NOTHING for granted.

Nothing can be a good thing.

 

 

September

/ Erica Herd / 15 Comments

So this widow thing has not been easy. The almost two year mark is fast approaching: September 29, 2016. Permanently etched in my heart, mind, body and soul. Sometimes I feel insane, like I might break into a primal scream at my workplace, but I try my best to keep the rage and insanity at bay.

August 30th is our wedding anniversary. I try not to think about it, but I do. It would have been ten years.

September 26th is my birthday, which feels like a permanent wash. I do not know if I will ever enjoy having a birthday again. Lorin said he wanted to celebrate my birthday after we arrived in Savannah, September 29, 2016. The new chapter of our lives that never was.

He told me he had purchased special jewelry for the occasion. It was never found at the scene of the car accident.

Not that it meant much at the time. More salt in the already-tired wounds.

I am full of rage at the injustice of Lorin’s death. He was not ill; he is not “in a better place.” I am a lapsed Catholic. I was a very pious child—wanted to be a nun for all of third grade. I believed in a “better place.” But I don’t believe in heaven anymore, so there’s that.

There is no way to “spin” the rage or the sadness when it comes. I don’t make apologies for it.

I am ordering some Jahrzeit candles from amazon to mark the second anniversary of Lorin’s death. They don’t sell them at Kroger or Publix. In New York City, they are easy to find.

From Wikapedia: A yahrzeit candle, also spelled yahrtzeit candle or called a memorial candle, (Hebrew: ‫נר נשמה‎, ner neshama,[1][2] meaning “soul candle”; Yiddish: ‫יאָרצײַט ליכט‎ yortsayt likht, meaning “anniversary candle”) is a type of candle that is lit in memory of the dead in Judaism.[3] A yahrzeit candle, also spelled yahrtzeit candle or called a memorial candle, (Hebrew: ‫נר נשמה‎, ner neshama,[1][2] meaning “soul candle”; Yiddish: ‫יאָרצײַט ליכט‎ yortsayt likht, meaning “anniversary candle”) is a type of candle that is lit in memory of the dead in Judaism.[3]

I am terrified. I don’t know if I can make it through these next seven weeks, without . . . but I will try.

 

Inglorious Rage

/ Erica Herd / 9 Comments


(google image)

Nobody likes an angry woman

she’s unbecoming in the worst way

a primal scream can’t cure

an uncontrollable rage

it frightens me

how deep it is

rooted in me

like an ancient tree

I want it to go away

but somehow, I don’t

It lets me know I am still

alive

and that you matter so much,

and that you will never go away

20 Months

/ Erica Herd / 12 Comments

(google image)

Today is the 20-month anniversary of Lorin’s death. I think about him every day, and light a candle for him every night. The passage of time has not altered my love for him or the depth of my sadness, and anger, that he has left this earth.

Lorin and I loved our many road trips together. He used to say he was “Driving Miss Sweetie” — Miss Sweetie being me.

We planned our music, audio books, snacks and drinks ahead of time. It was always an adventure.

On the drive home from Orlando after a long weekend, there was a delay on I-4 East due to a car accident. A fatal car accident.

In the past, I might have been annoyed at such a delay, but yesterday I felt differently.

I imagined how annoyed motorists must have been after our car accident on September 29, 2016. How they might have been complaining how they would be late for work or to  take their kids to school that morning. I used to be one of those people.

Yesterday I felt profound sadness.  Tears welled in my eyes as I thought of the life or lives that were lost on I-4. As we passed the mangled red SUV, I said a brief prayer for the deceased and his / her family.

Another lost soul on the American highway.

Another family, grief-stricken and traumatized.

I will never forget the beautiful person I lost on September 29, 2016. I am forever altered and still struggle to understand why only my cat Samson and I survived.

Perhaps someday it will all come clear. Until that day, I will do the best I can to make sense of it all and live another day.

April Showers

/ Erica Herd / 6 Comments

It’s April.

Time of spring, Easter, resurrection, rejoicing or . . . not.

I’m not finding it very cheery thus far.
Perhaps it’s due to the gloomy weather we’ve been having in the low country.

At the risk of waxing too melancholy, I will invoke the spirit of writers past who conveyed it in ways quite sublime, albeit tragic/sad.

A Well-Worn Story (Dorothy Parker)

In April, in April,
My one love came along,
And I ran the slope of my high hill
To follow a thread of song.

His eyes were hard as porphyry
With looking on cruel lands;
His voice went slipping over me
Like terrible silver hands.

Together we trod the secret lane
And walked the muttering town.
I wore my heart like a wet, red stain
On the breast of a velvet gown.

In April, in April,
My love went whistling by,
And I stumbled here to my high hill
Along the way of a lie.

Now what should I do in this place
But sit and count the chimes,
And splash cold water on my face
And spoil a page with rhymes? 

The Waste Land  (T.S. Eliot) (an excerpt)

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.

Survived Christmas

/ Erica Herd / 7 Comments

(google image)

No Christmas movies on TV this year
Caught “Bad Santa” on Netflix, though.
Enforced jubilation wears on the soul
inside I’m screaming, “No more!”

Wish I had a new brain
free of the pain
no trauma
to re-live
helpless, out of control

I sincerely wish you all “Merry Christmas”
and  a “Happy New Year”
though I can’t wait for it
to go

Don’t expect me to smile
though I know how to laugh
Surviving the Ghosts of Christmas
Present and Past

 

 

Day of Atonement

/ Erica Herd / 5 Comments

Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, fast approaches. It begins sundown September 29 and ends the evening of September 30.

More importantly, September 29 is the anniversary of Lorin’s death.

If you are a believer, this is the day that God will forgive you, purify you and cleanse you of all your sins.

I am hoping that God or whatever Life Force there is will help me get through this day.

I fear the day. It will mark the end of all “firsts”: the first Thanksgiving without Lorin, the first Christmas without Lorin, the first Valentine’s Day, the first wedding anniversary, the first birthday, and so on.

This Day may bring a measure of closure, but of this, like everything else, I cannot be certain. I have learned there is no certainty and no security in life. I am accepting this without self-pity or a sense of hopelessness. It is my truth. I am living it.

My life is forever changed, having lost my “Lost One.” That’s what Lorin used to call me, referring to the short story “The Lost Ones” by Samuel Beckett. On September 29, I lost the love of my life, my favorite person in the world, my writing partner, and the one who understood me better than anyone ever has, and possibly ever will.  I will try to be happy and continue to write and pursue the dreams we had forged as “Team Sweetie,” but I am forever changed.

Do not pity me.

Love more.

 

 

Anniversaries

/ Erica Herd / 12 Comments

Today is the eleven month anniversary of Lorin’s death. Tomorrow is our wedding anniversary. We would have been married nine years.

I do not plan to celebrate our anniversary. I will light a candle for Lorin as I do every night and try to think about the happy times we shared.

Lorin died three days after my birthday, so that will be another day I think I’d rather forget.  We were planning to celebrate my birthday in Savannah when we arrived, intact. He bought me some jewelry and was very excited about giving it to me. The jewelry did not survive the car accident. It went missing or was destroyed, don’t know which.

Some pearls of wisdom from the world of trauma and grief:

(1)  Things that used to be bother me a great deal don’t bother me anymore.

(2)  Things that didn’t bother me before may really upset me.

(3) Don’t waste time.

(4) I do not suffer whiners gladly.

I am still trying to figure out why I survived, what my purpose is. It’s lonely being the survivor. Samson survived too. I couldn’t touch him for the first couple weeks after the accident. He seemed afraid of me and was obviously traumatized. When he finally let me pick him up, he seemed uncomfortable or in pain. His little bones must have been bruised.

Here he is with his new best friend Bo, who I adopted in November:

This song is dedicated to my dear Lorin, who was a wonderful dancer. He liked to grab me while I was in the kitchen or in the living room fussing, and start dancing with me. I miss that, among other things.  I wish I could dance with him one more time.

 

Why me? (re-blog)

/ Erica Herd / 1 Comment

I came across this post today from Tyson 72.  Being a recent widow myself, I have not come across many (or any) blogs written by widowers.  His story is painful, heartfelt and beautifully written.  Please comment at his site, not mine.

Thank you.