Let the wound heal. That phrase from the psychologist stuck with me. That is something that I feel I have not been doing. Being here down south has only opened the wound and I have felt vulnerable and uncomfortable the whole time. I am happy that I came down because it allowed my wife to spend time with her family. She needed it and when you love someone you sacrifice for them sometimes. It has to be a balance and in our case it is.
My body has been screaming at me to go home for days now and every day we stay down here the feeling grows. I am being exposed to so many first times and people trying to console Cristina in, honestly, the most insulting ways I can imagine. When people see us, they focus on her and hardly anyone has asked me how I am doing. They look at me when they say hi and then ignore me for the rest of the time. Even people I considered close friends did not even have a kind word for me.
I know that I cannot live life without exposing the wound. But it needs to be healing for more time than it is exposed. I need to think long and hard about the week I have spent down here because in all honesty it has felt horrible. Everything I do just reminds me that Alba is no longer here. I have no room to be alone and have intimacy with my wife. I guess the silver lining I can take from coming down here is that it cements the kind of life I want to live, the kind of interactions I want to have with people, and what routines and hobbies are essential to me. In order to make these realizations worth something I need to be disciplined when I go back home and stick to the routines and hobbies and make them a priority.
I am also very nervous because I am on paternity leave, meaning I cannot legally work and the government has yet to pay me a dime and I have been on leave for two months. Spanish bureaucracy shining bright again. It is another thing that is making me feel trapped and stuck in a moment that I need to heal from. The way I am, the way I am treated down here is not a life I believe Alba would be proud of. I feel like I am on standby and my promise to her is to take advantage of life and lead with love.For whatever reason I do not feel like that is something I can do here. It is hard to lead with love down here. Ok, when re-reading this text I can see that I am being overly critical about being down here. It’s just that I have had a shit time and I am seeing everything in a negative light.
The big lesson I take from this is when grieving, try to put yourself in places that make you feel safe, and comfortable and that allow you to shine and unleash your potential. If that is home, then stay home. If that is traveling then try and take the time to make short trips. Life is going to feel so heavy and painful as it is that putting yourself in places that are not optimal for you will make everything feel worse.
This is all combined with my love and dedication to my wife. She has asked me a few times if we should just go home, but I did not want to cut her time with her family short. They live 6 hours away by car and we don’t see them all that often. I know that if I told her to leave before the week was up she would do it but it would make her feel sad and guilty. That is something that I do not want to provoke as she has just as much right to go through her grief as she needs to. I do wonder if she needs to come back down very soon if I would go with her. Right now I think not. Which is hard because we don’t like to be separated from one another.
To rewind a little, a few days ago we had a session with the psychologist, and among other things, she talked about letting the wound heal and it made me think a lot about the session we had the previous week with the support group. In the moment I felt pretty good about the session, but looking back on it now I think that it was maybe a little soon to go to a session like that. There was no official moderator who had been trained to handle groups of that nature and it was just a group of us sharing our pain and my wound just got ripped open. I feel like I have spent the whole week just trying to recover from that session. The psychologist also warned us to be careful going into situations like that and that it is key to have a professional there to make sure things go the way they should.
Being down here I have heard so many people complain about so many different things and it has got me thinking. Complainers are thieves. They take away your soul and suck the life out of you. Just being in their presence is miserable, and horrible. Now that I think about it, my wife and I have not complained once since Alba died. We have expressed ourselves, told each other we miss her, that her absence hurts. But she has never complained and we have never gone on a rant with other people about how shit life is and just complained. Crazy. Now that I think about it, what the fuck do other people have to complain about. Man, it makes me want to spend even less time with those kinds of people and allow my wound to heal. I just want to go home.