Try Not to Breathe

"I will try not to burden you. I can hold these inside. I will hold my breath until all these shivers subside, just look in my eyes.

I will try not to worry you. I have seen things that you will never see. Leave it to memory me. I shudder to breathe."

I was on the treadmill listening to my ipod, and R.E.M.'s Try Not To Breathe started playing. Wow! The correlation with the lyrics and my experience with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder due to Mike's death are almost uncanny. With the exception of my therapist and perhaps two or three others, I rarely discuss my daily struggles with PTSD.

I find that unless I am speaking with someone who has shared my experience, people just have no clue how to relate. God bless them, they try to find a way to relate with one of their life altering experiences. But ultimately, watching your loved one collapse and die with no advance warning is beyond traumatizing. When you add in the factor of being woken up from a sound sleep, it is unbearable at times. For months I was unable to fall asleep till I actually passed out from exhaustion. And then I would wake up every hour or so to a panic attack.

I was sleep deprived, emotionally drained, delirious at times, and full of sorrow and depression. But at the same time I was trying to find some normalcy in my life in any way that I could. I can honestly say that I was and sometimes still am the poster girl of dysfunctional. PTSD and grieving the loss of a loved one do not make a functional human being in any way, shape, or form!

On the rare occasion that I had tried to share my experiences and feelings, it was as if someone was trying to put a Hello Kitty Band-aid over a gaping flesh wound. So instead I kept my pain inside, because sharing it just made the pain worse for me. And it seemed that it would be better for me to just keep it to myself, than share it with others who ultimately would just end up worrying about me.

But I guess the thing that I didn't realize was that perhaps letting people put those Hello Kitty Band-aids on my wounds would help them in their own grieving process. Maybe I needed to endure the extra pain early on, and there would not be some much pain in the aftermath of it all? Then again perhaps if I did not hold all those feelings inside I would have ended up in a mental health facility? I guess in the end it is what it is...