Good Grief 200

Samaritan

Some people drink themselves into oblivion, some take drugs, others cycle, run, go to the gym obsessively, others self harm, eat, don't eat, clean, sleep ... the list is pretty endless. Ways of coping. Or not. As I sink and everything becomes much darker, it all gets tricky. If I haven't got to negotiate work, I am momentarily relieved. The utter relentlessness of it, the exhaustion, the driven target setting, the feeling fraudulent and useless, the structure, the systems, the saturation, the blotting paper absorption of unrelenting stuff, takes its toll. Love it and value it as I do, it can be crushing. It was ok when my husband was alive, hard as it was when he was ill, there was nourishment to come home to.
Now, I try to make that up for myself as well as I can but it can feel paltry at times. 
The landscape, the music and occasional contact here and there, and beauty, are all great blessings for which I am eternally grateful. And blip of course too. It helps to provide many levels and layers of connection and reflection on the world, both within and without.

Today, as I was sinking, I was wondering what might help to pull me out of my perpetual descent, for today at least. It is a mire of decision making that can be easily sabotaged. Walk, swim, go somewhere, do something, clean, shop - stuff I could do, stuff I should do. 
But when these darker descents suck on the life marrow it is a case of numbing and/or hoping there may be something that can inject, shoot up, a burst of something creative into the veins.
I decided to go to a play I had wanted to see. Bit of a trek but once I have decided I just have to drive, that is quite good. There's nothing else to do and you go from A to B. The radio helps, Dead Ringers raised a smile on the Attenborough spoof of the lesser spotted Eagle. Feeling a laugh rise through the murky depths is a relief. 
And then the play was just right. Immediate, visceral and a perfect portrayal of the brutality of grief and how it inhabits you like a beast until you and the beast are indistinguishable. It was a relief to watch and a relief to see a mirrored feeling reach down into me and pull on the entrails it knows are its own kind and find a home there, family ... huddled together in the dark gut.
I cried through a lot of it.

... oh, I nearly forgot ... the rose fragranced my journey home. It is called 'Samaritan' and I got it for my friend who's mother in law has finally died. We had been looking at one of her roses that hasn't flourished this year so I thought this one would be nice as a marker of a new phase for them after such a difficult time.