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You have hit the bargaining phase of grief, Clayton.  If counseling is not for you, perhaps you could contact a support group.  Share your feelings with people who have like experiences and know how important it is to have someone to listen and truly empathize.  No advice, just good ears.  Or just listen.  Who knows, you may end up helping someone else.  You are in my prayers.

I was just in a bookstore this morning and found myself in the self-help section and thought the exact same thing! But I did find a book for you (not in that section) that I hope might give you a different perspective - or at least a somewhat consoling read.

I think the first commenter made the point I was intending to make.  Therapy isn’t for everyone.  A doctor trying to fix a broken heart seems so clinical.  They are there to listen though and sometimes that’s just what we need. 

I was also going to mention finding a support group—people going through what you’re going through.  And like the first poster said, you could end up helping someone else.  From what you’ve mentioned about Erin, she was someone always willing to help someone else out and she’d probably enjoy you helping others in her place. It’s worth a shot if there’s even a tiny chance it could make this process easier for you.

And I’m sure you realize that losing you would just leave a lot of other people feeling the way you feel now.  And I’m sure you wouldn’t wish this on anyone.  So take care of yourself and find someone to talk to.

Ernie and I took the kids to Concan this past week.  We had such a good time and I often found myself thinking of you and the trip to Concan we all took as teenagers (which would have been about 20 years ago now that I think about it - wow, we are getting old Chip!) Ernie and I spent a lot of time just swinging on the front porch swing and looking out over the beautiful Texas hill country.  It was so serene and peaceful and how I wished that you could feel that same peaceful feeling in your life right now.  While there, I had a lot of time to reflect on what a true friend you have been through out the years and how terribly saddened I am by what has happened in your life. You are truly living a nightmare of the worst kind.  I can’t even begin to imagine what you’re going through and I hate that things won’t be easy for a very long time...but we all know time does help to heal and some day you will again be able to experience the joys in life as you once knew them.  I realize that things have settled down and you are slowly getting readjusted back into your life as you now know it.  With your Mom and Bob several hours away and now Sean being gone please know that if you should ever need an old friend you know I am just across town and I can be there whenever and for however long you need to a shoulder to lean on.  It does not matter the time of day or night or whether it’s a work day or weekend just call me and I’ll be there.

When I lost my dad, quite tragically and not through the process of aging or a slow, degenerative process as most people, though it’s not the same as losing a spouse I’ll agree, I thought for quite some time that therapy wasn’t for me.  I’ve taken enough psychology in school to know how it works.  I’m too smart for therapy, I thought.  It’s for other people, I thought.  It’s for weak minded people, I thought.  Not me, I thought.

I’d been in therapy before, sent when I was a kid to try to figure out what was wrong with me to make a 9 year old boy swallow a bottle of valium and then at 11 when my moods became dark enough that I started stealing things, things they didn’t know about and then things they did know about, like a gun.  Until my father was found dead in my little brother’s apartment, by his own hand , by my little brother and his now ex-wife, my parent’s divorce had been the most traumatic experience of my life.  It was the punctuation mark on nine years of being bailed on, or so I thought and coincided with “the Church” turning its back on my father and sending the lives of everyone in my immediate family into a flat spin with what seemed like no place to land.  And so here again was someone close to me bailing, doing the ultimate bailing out, and what would they, or anyone, say about him then if they knew the truth about what happened?  Would that minister that spoke at his funeral have accepted the request?  And then came all the “what ifs” and the going back, step by step, from the last phone call, the last visit...more I could have done...more I could have anticipated. 

I went along with therapy as a kid because what choice did I have?  Even as a kid the whole notion seemed silly.  I went, I did like they asked and I thought I had them all fooled.  They wanted me to talk, so I talked.  But I didn’t really understand everything that was happening to me, or them.  I just wanted to be left alone.  Then and now the notion of group therapy, sharing with a room full of strangers...that’s alien.  I was allergic to that.  I would fight that.  I don’t want their hugs, their words of support, their acceptance...and I don’t want to know about their pain.  I don’t share unless I want to share and some circle-jerk of sharing and comforting just wasn’t going to happen with me, ever. 

Eventually I came around to therapy because of what the grief did to me six months down the line...a year down the line.  I came to it when I became desperate.  I’ve always prided myself on my control, on my ability to give people no idea what I’m thinking or feeling.  My ability to put a wall between what goes on inside me and everyone else had been honed for quite some time.  That wall crumbled.  To be and feel completely out of control and not know how I was going to react to stress was the most frightening experience I think I’ve ever felt.  It also drove people from me.  I didn’t like the way it had morphed and was turning me into someone I didn’t like and doing things that were beyond my control.  It goes somewhere.  It will find a way out and it can change core pieces of a person’s personality and bend them into someone different. 

These things follow a sort of conservation of energy.  What is created by the grief isn’t destroyed, these emotions don’t die and what you’re feeling can persist...or it can change forms.  Maybe it will stay as it is, making you emotional, making you less social than you were.  Maybe it will bring out new self-destructive tendencies.  Maybe just destructive.  You’ve known me for almost half my life...can you imagine me putting a 20lb Vornado fan through a sheetrock wall from a room away?  Can you imagine me so furious that I feel compelled to break furniture or appliances because it felt like I’d explode if I didn’t get rid of the rage into an object, like I was transfering out of my hands into something else and giving it away?  Can you imagine me foot on the floor, leaving smoke and rubber through a residential street, out into traffic, around turn after turn, between cars and, possibly, people, visualizing my car smashing into the side of a building, or another car?  Stone cold sober.

I don’t have to imagine it. 

I decided to go see someone because I thought that would help me for someone else but I kept going after the first couple visits for myself because, lo and behold, it started to work.  I made the mistake of stopping when I knew they were going to tell me I was making a mistake, playing out a predictable scenario, going the way hundreds and thousands of other “individuals” took their lives, over and over and over.

The thing is, they can’t fix anyone, there is no fix but they can listen, and a total stranger with nothing vested in either the person grieving or the person grieved over has the ability to listen objectively, to observe objectively, to help validate feelings and to point out things that could be different in ways that even good friends can’t or won’t say.  It’s mostly listening but then, depending on their school of thought, you’re guided in techniques that let you recognize, manage and diffuse what’s going on.  But it won’t work if it’s done to please others.  It has to be because the person going wants it.  I used to think it was a scam, a parlor trick, etc.  The feelings come from a place we have no control over but the part of the brain we do have some control over can be helped so that the connections to feelings are reinforced with good and healthy connections.  But someone has to be ready to take the step for themselves.

They help you help yourself.  I’m going back, as soon as I get back to work.  I’ve still got a lot of issues.  Thankfully, my father isn’t one of the biggest anymore, or overwhelming, but I still can’t talk about it with people.  That and the fact that I’m not attracted to anything but major daddy issue, destined to fulfill my abandonment issue, females is something I have to get ahold of too.  Otherwise I’m going to die alone, just like my father.  That’s something I want to change for myself and it will be me that changes it, with a little help from someone who’s listened to a hundred or hundreds of other people with the same story as me, the same issues as me, playing out the same drama, over and over and over. 

Sorry for such a rambling response.  I worry about you and hope you take care of yourself.  Not to make me happy but to make yourself happier and healthier.  Not to forget EL but to remember her without it kneecapping you and debilitating you and changing you into a different person than I’ve ever known you to be.  But it’s something you have to arrive at, or not, completely on your own, just as I did, just as I do, just as I will.  It’s a process not an ending.  It’s a journey, not a destination.  That’s what life is.  And what I wish you to get out of seeing a professional is what it can do to improve or prevent in your life six months from now, a year from now, two years from now.  When the pain that you feel so sharply on the surface has laid roots and isn’t as visible.  I’m lucky to be alive through my own grief rising again to the surface, transformed into something completely different than what I felt after that February 6th.

They’re not intellectualizing the grief away, they can’t do a thing about where it springs from or “it”.  What their textbooks and case studies and research and experience with scores of people gives them is the ability to see, very accurately, what that grief that we cannot control will manifest in our behavior, because as much as we like to believe we’re all different from the person next to us we’re really very predictable creatures.  Anticipating and managing what we do with our grief so that it doesn’t control us, so that we can recognize what it’s doing rather than what it’s done, that, I think, is the goal of therapy.

Okay, I’ll shut up now.  I know you screen these and you don’t have to post it.  If only you read it that’s okay but I’m fine with you posting it.  Some of these things are things I couldn’t say when I was there.  Some of these things I didn’t know if I could say at all.  Not wanting to push, not wanting to burdon, not wanting to be wrong.