Whence Do The Water Works Flow?
Despite what I write here, I am not an openly emotional person; which is one of the reasons I write what I do here. As a child, I cried when my dog died of heart worms. He survived distemper and more, but a parasite carried by the most deadly animal on the planet, the mosquito, finally did him in. I did not cry when our cat, whom we got before I got my dog, died as the result of eating something that ate rat poison. I wanted to, but found I could not. I did not cry upon the death of my great grandfather when I was a freshman in high school, nor when my Great grandmother died while I served in the navy. Nor any of my grandparents, sad to the extreme though I was. I did not cry when I twisted my knee two summers ago while playing on an aquatic obstacle course though the pain was by far the worst I had ever experienced, and I have had some doozies of injuries including smashing a finger tip to hamburger.
I have found myself sobbing while at home many times since last November when the separation from my son became real and the untimely death of my father hit in the same week, but this last week has been particularity rough. Okay, yes, my own birthday marked 3 months without contact with my son and fathers day this year being my first without both my own father and son, but why when I watch anything of what World Cup fans from abroad are experiencing in the US? Why do these cause sudden uncontrolled bouts of sobbing? After several days of this, I believe I know why. I should be enjoying these with my son, and I am not.
Is he even enjoying his team’s progress or is he bed ridden from the side effects of the antidepressants his mother has him on, or, is he missing it because he is hiding out on the toilet still? Or, is he watching it with his uncle, whom I slowly grew suspicious of, thinking he was trying to use my son as a surrogate for his own whom he lost in divorce when his son was a toddler? Or is he enjoying them with his new found friends? All I know is that although he is physically just a mile distant, I might as well be on the moon and it is killing me.
These things can build up inside of us without us being aware. I’d also long lost the ability to cry. As a kid, I was inconsolable when my maternal grandmother died. The only thing that compared to that was the loss of my mother nearly 20 years later. I didn’t understand why I was less emotional when it came to my dad just a few years later. The breakup with my first love just a couple of years before losing my mother also left deep scars.
Maybe those key events hardened me in some way and it was only towards the end of the panic that the dam burst but this time it was a pet. So trusting and so reliant on me and yet I was so powerless to do anything. Since then, I developed a lot more empathy for animals in general and feel more emotional than I do towards most humans.
Another element that complicates this is that I am more convinced than ever that our spirit lives on and in many cases even reincarnates. And even though the reincarnated individual does not usually recall their precious life in their material consciousness, at a deeper level the spirit is aware of all previous lives. I honestly don’t know how I would react if my mother had lived to this point in time.
In your case the nastiness of your wife delayed your ability to grieve and perhaps now you are grieving the loss of the person she once was along with the loss of your son. The latter may or may not be permanent but the former is gone forever.
Your son is also probably experiencing some kind of protective mechanism which just forces him to shut off even those who love him as a way of avoiding future hurt and disappointment. It’s not rational but people usually aren’t when they have been living in conditions we were never designed for. The relationships with my own kids are certainly not as close or as deep as if we had lived in a more natural way during their childhood. Instead I spent a lot of time away from home. Some of that was work but a lot of that was escape from the fact that I wasn’t doing too well.
Q probably rhetorical... Sending virtual hugs.