Limbo

I haven't been on my blog much in the last two months. I have many draft posts but nothing has felt right. Everything I have started to write is off, like I have been off.

My life has been in this state of limbo ever since my husband received a call from his step mom that his dad's cancer treatment was no longer working. Not only was his dad dying in that eventual sense, the cancer was winning and his body wasn't going to hold out against it much longer.

That was in the middle of July. Less than three weeks later, my father-in-law was gone.

Your perception on life changes when you are touched by loss or death.  Mine changed when someone I love was impacted deeply by such a loss. In addition to the grief my husband experiences, there are the complications of family, the practical matters that continue to need to be addressed, the mundane day-to-day obligations that do not stop just because we wish them to.

Life is in a state of limbo because we are on hold. We ride the waves of grief and loss, paddling as hard as we can against currents and rip tides. We try to stay out of the emotional drama of others, but find ourselves getting sucked into these tricky vortexes while we attempt to support others while we cling to each other. Our energy is not there for the mundane tasks - it is devoured by simply being.

A good friend calls this survival mode. And it is. We are not thriving during this time of loss. We are not to the point of rebuilding our lives in a world without my husband's father. We are dealing with crises of varying degrees of urgency and we are giving what little empathy we have left to others. In a sense, we feel bankrupt. Empty. Slogging through the mire with one foot in front of the other because if we stop we will lay down. If we lay down we will be stuck.

Limbo is not a restful place. It is a place of not quite being. Of survival. Of needing to be alert for the danger at our back so we can run at a moment's notice. Hypervigilance partnered with a soul deep exhaustion.  I don't want to live here any more. I want my life back. We want our lives back. And slowly, we chip away at the mountain before us, knowing that even when the crises have passed, life will never return to what we once knew. We will be forever altered. We will have to figure out a new normal.