remembering those days after

[lilyjohn]

Tonight I was reading again from the story I wrote about mine and Johnny's relationship. What I read tonight was about those last few weeks in Washington before I moved back to California just 4 short months after losing Johnny

As I read what I wrote I realized that those feelings seem to be universal for most who lose their soul mate. I would like to share some of those thoughts here. I know there are many who can relate.

It is so hard to try to put the emotions that I have been through into words. There are days still when those emotions overwhelm me and I am almost paralyzed, unable to do anything more than relive them all.

I think I will try to explain by using something that any mother should understand. When you are pregnant your every move is connected to your baby. You feed it through your body. You comfort it by rubbing your belly. You talk to that child inside of you while you are alone. You are no longer one person but two. Everyone who meets you views you as two people. Your attention as well as most everyone else's is focused on that unborn child. Being pregnant consumes most of your thoughts and energy.

When your child is born a change takes place. Not just physical but mentally and emotionally. You are relieved to be past the pregnancy and that your child is well and whole. You can relax because you no longer have the fear of uncertainty. Your pride in your child is enormous. Everything should be just great but that is not always the case. There are some who suffer from post partem depression. The feeling of being let down in some way. You and your baby are no longer the center of attention all of the time. Life goes on around you and you almost feel cheated in some way. You have spent nine long months wrapped in a world of you and your child. Now that world has changed. You are one person again instead of two. Some women handle it very well and those thoughts just streak across their mind and are gone. For others it becomes a major problem.

When you are caring for someone it is much like being pregnant. If that person is ill or has any kind of emotional problems your world becomes centered around their care. You cook for them and clean for them. You worry about their medications and appointments. You give them all of their emotional support and worry about finding ways to help them deal with whatever their problem is. It becomes a twenty four hour a day world that exists of little but you and the one you are caring for. In my case it was even more so because I was so far away from my family and because Johnny had no one else that he could turn to. No one to count on for any kind of support. I did everything for him. Not because I had to but because I loved him and wanted to be there for him. I wanted him to feel secure.

We were a team. Our love for each other made us like one person. When one of us suffered the other did. There was no me and no Johnny. There was only us. Then suddenly he was gone and I found myself totally alone. No one needed my care any more. There were no appointments to make and no doctors office to drive to. No medications to pick up or hand out. There were no anxiety attacks to talk him down from. There was no one to snuggle at night and no one to say "I love you". Everything that had been my world for five and a half months was gone. I was no longer the most important person in anyone else's life. I was alone and unneeded.

If pregnancy that culminates with the birth of a beautiful child can sometimes have such a devastating effect on someone try to imagine what losing your world can do to you. No one can truly understand what it is like until they have been there. There is no one to share with. Even the little things that seemed so unimportant before just point out that you are alone. You want to share them with the person you love but they are gone.

You don't ask for the sadness or the anger. You don't want to have your insides feel like they are being ripped open. Those things just become a part of you and you have to learn to live with them. It is not easy. Having someone tell you that you need to get over it or get on with your life is such a waste of time no matter how good their intentions are. They are only reinforcing what you know already. The problem isn't that you don't know. It is that you can't. You just simply can not go back to life like it was because that life no longer exists!

I tried to help myself but I just couldn't. I missed Johnny so much that my world seemed to have just stopped. There was and still is a giant hole in my life that no one or nothing can fill. I know that it will always be there. I couldn't watch television because everything I saw was a vivid reminder of how much I had lost. It became just noise to me. I couldn't even use the sound for company. Every thing on television was about a world that still existed. A world that had ended for me.

Even all of the years that I let no thoughts of Johnny enter my conscious mind I know that he was somewhere deep inside of me. I knew that he was alive somewhere even if I never let myself think about him. Now that knowledge is gone. He was a constant in my life that formed my foundation as an adult. Without him the world was ripped from under me. Finding my footing would take a very long time and still that footing is very shaky.

Anyone who saw us together would have seen the deep bond between us. It was very evident and very visible. People who didn't know us thought that we had been married for years. The way we interacted with each other was something that usually comes only after years of marriage. Sometimes it never comes.

My birthday came and went. The day before I went to the casino for a couple of hours and I also talked to my kids on the phone. On my birthday I saw no one except a florist delivery man who brought a plant that Jacci had sent.

When Valentines Day came I wanted to forget what day it was. That was the day that Johnny and I should have been married. It was supposed to be a day of promise and new beginnings. Instead it was a painful reminder that he was gone and that the life we had planned together would never be. I went to the casino again. It helped for a few hours to give my mind a rest but when I left I was right back where I had been. I remember driving home that evening. I was hurting so much and begging Johnny to wake me up. I reminded him of all of the times I had woke him from his nightmares. I was living the worst nightmare of my life and I needed him to wake me up! I begged him all the way home. I thought that my heart would explode with the pain.

tionship. What I read tonight was about those last few weeks in Washington before I moved back to California just 4 short months after losing Johnny.

As I read what I wrote I realized that those feelings seem to be universal for most who lose their soul mate. I would like to share some of those thoughts here. I know there are many who can relate.

[Trawna]

(((lilyjohn)))

Thank you for writing what so many of us feel It is hard to be left behind when the love of our life has been taken away.

[lilyjohn]

It seems that when I copied and pasted I messed up and got some at the top and the bottom. I hope the message still gets across. So many of us suffer but unless you have been there yourself you have no idea how bad it can be.

I feel like it is my job to let people who are going through what I did see that I really do understand. I know how hard it is when no one can understand and they keep telling you what you should do. Having someone who does understand makes you not feel so alone. It took me a very long time before I found that person so now I try to be there sooner. For some reason I have been given the ability to put those feelings into words. The pain caused the understanding but the ability to do that is a gift from God I am sure.