Same as it ever was
The positive spin is something like, "Today is the first day of the rest of my life". That's true in its way, and I'm trying to keep it in mind.
But -- you know how people who have suffered an emotional shock say that it's all like a bad dream? Folks tend to take that as a metaphor. It's not. One of the strange sensations that I find washing over me periodically is a sense of unreality that is almost overwhelming, and it borders on the feeling of lucid dreaming. There's that sense of, "Aha! Okay, this just plain doesn't make sense, so clearly I'm dreaming." Or the variant sensation that this isn't my life -- that it is *wrong* at a very basic level.
Basically, I'm living in a near-constant state of cognitive dissonance: the world is fundamentally failing to conform to my deepest beliefs about it, because at the most basic hindbrain level, Jane had become central to those beliefs.
Folks shouldn't fret overmuch: today is better than yesterday, and I *will* get past it. Frankly, one of the reasons I had to watch every last moment of the burial, long after the point where the funeral director expected everyone to leave, was to drive home the ugly reality of it. The committal service was beautiful but somehow ethereal; the truck that was needed to lift the lid of the vault and put it into place did much to ground the proceedings and make it all feel much *less* dreamlike.
Of course, the strangeness keeps coming fast and thick. While I'm working at home today, I'm copying some VHS tapes onto DVD. The one I'm copying right now, even as I type, I hadn't even remembered existed until today: a tape of her Pelican vigil and ceremony. Seeing all of us when we were much younger (and generally much thinner) sharpens the focus of reality in a horribly synchronistic way...
But -- you know how people who have suffered an emotional shock say that it's all like a bad dream? Folks tend to take that as a metaphor. It's not. One of the strange sensations that I find washing over me periodically is a sense of unreality that is almost overwhelming, and it borders on the feeling of lucid dreaming. There's that sense of, "Aha! Okay, this just plain doesn't make sense, so clearly I'm dreaming." Or the variant sensation that this isn't my life -- that it is *wrong* at a very basic level.
Basically, I'm living in a near-constant state of cognitive dissonance: the world is fundamentally failing to conform to my deepest beliefs about it, because at the most basic hindbrain level, Jane had become central to those beliefs.
Folks shouldn't fret overmuch: today is better than yesterday, and I *will* get past it. Frankly, one of the reasons I had to watch every last moment of the burial, long after the point where the funeral director expected everyone to leave, was to drive home the ugly reality of it. The committal service was beautiful but somehow ethereal; the truck that was needed to lift the lid of the vault and put it into place did much to ground the proceedings and make it all feel much *less* dreamlike.
Of course, the strangeness keeps coming fast and thick. While I'm working at home today, I'm copying some VHS tapes onto DVD. The one I'm copying right now, even as I type, I hadn't even remembered existed until today: a tape of her Pelican vigil and ceremony. Seeing all of us when we were much younger (and generally much thinner) sharpens the focus of reality in a horribly synchronistic way...