I am....

Grief doesn’t come with a checklist. I’m fully aware that if it did it would be never ending - written on a roll of paper that stretches to infinity.  This the first time that I’ve let myself feel grief deeply without working to shove it into a box that I then put in another, sturdier, box and then stick it on a shelf never to be revisited. And, damnit, the act of feeling grief this time has caused my shelf full of boxes to fall down and every single one of them has opened and the things that have spilled out are wild. Why am I sad about miscarriages I had in the 90s and remembering details I haven’t thought of in years? Why do I suddenly grieve the loss of my aunts and uncle more deeply than I did 10-20 years ago when they died tragically young? Why am I painfully aware of all of the losses that my friends have gone through that I didn’t show up for because I was avoiding feeling? Why am I terrified to mourn publicly because if I open these boxes I’m not sure how I’ll ever put everyth

This may seem sacrilegious to say but I did not like my husband the day he died. Or the day before. Or maybe even for most of the few weeks ahead of his death. I loved him, yes, but I did not like the version of him that I was living with at all. Not even a little bit.  I was hopeful that after he worked through the grief, and the mania, and the relapses that I could figure out a way back to the comfortable camaraderie we had for much of our marriage but that I also needed to be a realist and understand that I was losing a lot of my own mental health gains in this relationship and needed to protect myself.  This may seem insulting to the dead but when I bemoaned to my therapist that “I did not understand how spouses who actually liked their partners went back to work quickly after their death because I still feel somewhat disembodied by the whole thing” she said “It’s actually often easier for people that are in healthy relationships.”  I sat with that for a minute and said “maybe that

There’s nothing quite like when you find yourself having a full conversation about the day with your dog and truly wonder how long you’ve been talking.  My brain, even prior to the death/cancer/suicide trifecta of 2022, was never been a quiet place to exist. I’ve described the world in there as a place where I’m reading an entire orchestral score, with a stock market ticker tape running across the top, a perpetually refreshing Instagram feed on the side, but I’m riding a unicycle while doing long division and juggling Rubix cubes. On the outside, generally, I appear fairly calm. I have a reputation of being a very aggressive (and creative) problem solver.  Navigating those worlds, internal and external, takes a lot of energy.  I’ve been very open that I see a therapist regularly. However, I did not initially visit her for the chaos in my head or even the sexual assaults I’ve experienced. I went to her because I was having bad dreams about a jury trial and wanted a quick fix and because

August, 1944 - Scottsbluff, Nebraska - Barbara Neeley Journal Entry Someday years from now I will probably reread these pages and wonder why, in my youth, I thought I could write and attempted to put my thoughts and reactions into words. First, I assure myself very emphatically that I definitely have no talent along literary lines, and also that my extreme frankness sometimes could be described as almost brutal. These few pages do not develop into any particular story, except perhaps my own. Nor it is an autobiography (God forbid - I’m not that interesting). Shall we say it’s a “Collection of Recollections”. Frankly, one of the main reasons I want to write this is because I don’t want to entirely forget some of the interesting personalities whom I will describe later and I know I shall as the years pass. This little epistle started over three years ago. It starts then because that is when “yours truly” started to lead a double life. By this I mean that at times (evenings and w