Losing Tanner

It is the kind of day that taking xanax would have been a welcome relief. And part of me wants to write about anything else but the truth of how brutal the pain of this loss is, and what it has done to me. I am waking up again afraid of everything, afraid of the whole world, afraid of everything in my life. I will be 64 two weeks from tomorrow and I don’t know how to go on from here, what to do, how to manage. And no, medication wouldn’t help this. This time last year I was highly medicated and it didn’t make a difference. Existential crises must be lived through. I will live through this.

My sweet daughter Rachel will be over around 5. We’re going to watch a movie and visit for awhile. I have been on and off the phone with my best friend Jeff, and I just got off the phone with Jenny, my eldest daughter. I have lovely, loving people who are being so kind and supportive, I am not alone. I know that in this I am lucky. I don’t take it for granted. But losing Tanner, and what the devastation of his loss has shown me about myself, once again, is paralyzing. The abuse that I suffered from 4-18 left marks through my psyche and ability to do life at all. By 18 I had had the first of many breakdowns. I have been more in therapy than out in my lifetime and at almost 64 am still in weekly therapy. I am, to a very large extent, so afraid of the world at large I can barely leave my house and seldom do. I cannot work outside the home and, though I have tried, I haven’t found a way to make income from here. I have a very limited income, but I get by. But the thing is, taking everything in consideration, it is a life with sometimes crippling limitations. My carefully ordered world is what makes it possible for me to get through the days. My dogs are the center of my world. I wake up with them, they are by my side all day, we nap together, we sleep together at night, and for some years now I have gone to sleep at night with Tanner laying against my right side, my hand in his fur. It is an empty space there now, and the pain is knife sharp.

I will survive this, I know that I will, but it has brought, in sharp relief, the picture of my life as it is, as it has been, as it will be. It takes my breath away. It paralyzes me. At 64 I am physically healthy and getting in better shape all the time with the ketogenic diet, I am losing weight. I could live another 20 or 30 years. And do what? I know that sounds harsh, but let me explain.

Now, this is extremely difficult to talk about, and the only reason that I am is because I know that I am not alone in this, it is a terrible problem in the world today and I don’t know how to manage it. Here goes…

Because I live on so little money I receive some benefits. Not a lot, not like a lot of people get. I seem to have just enough that I don’t qualify for disability but little enough that I do get a little, not a lot, money toward food. I qualify for a government program that pays for my therapy. As I have no medical insurance since the fire I go to the clinic and I live on little enough that I am on the low end of the sliding scale when I absolutely must seek medical care. These few benefits that I do have are absolutely essential for me. If I made some money through various projects — and I have tried — I could make just enough to lose the few benefits that I do have but not enough to sustain anything that losing the benefits would leave me without. It is a Catch-22. So I face turning 64 and ask myself, What now? Even self-publishing a book, which I have long planned to do, if I were lucky enough to be successful enough to make some money with it, could mean I would lose these few benefits. The absolute terror and confusion about this is so paralyzing I can’t rightly explain it.

This is what losing Tanner has done. It has opened the floodgates of terror about every imaginable loss in my life. It has made me question what kind of life I can even have. It has made me question how I can begin to survive the loss of either of my other two little ones but I know this, I cannot live without a dog, I simply could not face life completely alone. Since I was a little girl going through terrible abuse it was my dogs that saved me. I said to Jeff this morning, as I have said many times before, “People have hurt me, animals never have.” Losing one of my beloved animal companions undercuts any kind of safety that I feel in the world. I am untethered. Every breath hurts. I can barely move from this chair.

Today I sat here while I was talking to Jeff and drew the lady above. Just a little doodling and smudging with pastels. I wasn’t trying to “make art” I was just trying to make something tangible to feel connected to something. It is messy, I felt funny sharing it, but today it’s all I had.

I think I am done here for now. I can’t think of anything else to say and I have already said too much, but if there is one other person who has these fears, know that I am holding you in my heart and prayers. We must get through this somehow, but how? What do you do if you can’t make your best effort in the world to get by a little easier without risking not being able to get by at all? That’s what is haunting me today. Tanner made me feel okay in the world. His bright, bold, young spirit led us all here somehow. Without him I am lost. I don’t know what else to say.