It’s been nearly three months since I’ve blogged here, and it isn’t that the abortion has slipped out of my mind so much as I had to let it go for a while. In the intervening time, D. has come back into my life, but just as the same issues of anger and abandonment are cropping up, and he is refusing to talk to me, I’ve signed up for a post-abortion support group at the Chicago Women’s Health Center, which starts Sept 18, and I’ve reached out for therapy at the Family Institute. I’m tired of depending solely on friends to make it through such a difficult time, and I’m beginning to fully grasp the concept of being powerless over many things.

I’ve had a headache for at least eighteen hours, a dull pressure permanently furrowed into my brow and periodically accompanied by nausea. If I didn’t have an IUD, I’d think maybe I were pregnant, but the realization that I’m not doesn’t prevent the flashbacks of when I was, the day I spent alone in the hospital because D. couldn’t or wouldn’t come to stay with me, the days after when all I could do was curl up on the couch and watch mindless television in the hope that blathering idiots would take the focus off of the churning in my stomach, the cloudy morning M. drove me to the clinic, the sunny mid-day we spent afterward that I’ll never remember because I was too far gone on Ativan.

I don’t know if I’m ready for Sept 18, but I don’t know if I’ll ever be ready. The support group lasts three weeks and includes some grieving rituals, which I know will be helpful. What I fear is reopening old wounds, in particular the deep sadness and guilt I feel over my first two abortions, both of which were second-trimester procedures. But it helps to know I’ve found a safe space in which to expose this raw feeling, since I’m tired of wincing every time I’m in a rough spot, and something else triggers something that rubs up against them.

I am hopeful for the future. I am grateful to have come this far. I don’t know what lies ahead, but I know I will work to make my life better. And in that sense, even though I don’t know if I’m ready for next Tue, I’m just going to have to be.

I hate my life today. I hate crying, I hate feeling so sad and empty, and I hate that I don’t know when this will ever end. I hate spending my life at 1:32am crying and crying and crying, and getting a headache because of all the crying. I just want it all to end right now, but I don’t see how I can possibly make that happen without hurting myself, and I definitely don’t want to do that in the least. I just want the pain to go away. I’d do anything to just feel nothing right now. Why can’t someone just come and help me and take it all away? I feel so alone and abandoned and just plain unloved, even though I know I’m not. This is what 1:32 am does to me today, I guess.

If there’s one thing I hate, it’s grieving. After my grandmother died, the process was so difficult I entered into several years of therapy, in which I had the chance to come to terms with plenty of other issues. But the grieving itself nearly killed me, and it’s during subsequent bouts of grief when I worry most about whether I’ll have the courage to keep going on in life. The past week has brought an entirely new episode of coming to terms with loss into my life, and once again I’m at that point where the pain seems interminable.

Doing some research about the grieving process, I found a website that isn’t so much critical of Kübler-Ross’s stages of grieving as it is honest about grieving being highly subjective. About the five stages of grief, in fact, Kübler-Ross said,

They were never meant to help tuck messy emotions into neat packages. They are responses to loss that many people have, but there is not a typical response to loss, as there is no typical loss. Our grief is as individual as our lives.

And the site, instead, offers three general categories of grief:

1. The first reaction to loss, SHOCK can involve just minutes or last for days. You might feel numb or be in disbelief. You might be unable to make simple decisions or attend to your daily routine;
2. When the shock wears off, the SUFFERING begins and can last for weeks, months, and intermittently for years. If you’re suffering from a loss, you’ll typically experience waves of emotions that can involve sadness, anger, guilt, anxiety, or any combination of those feelings and others. The pain is as palpable a physical experience as it is emotional. You might also experience physical symptoms such as loss of appetite, sleeplessness, or chest pain, and behavioral symptoms such as withdrawal from society, mood swings, or inability to concentrate; and
3. RECOVERY represents not the end of pain over a loss but the ability to reconnect to the interesting and joyful parts of life — to refocus your attention from your pain of loss to living with meaning and purpose.

I think it’s safe to say I’ve entered the Suffering Stage over the past 48 hours. I’ll be fine for a little while but then start thinking of all that’s happened over the past ten days, and I’m reduced to a blubbering mess. I’m having to force myself to eat; nothing tastes good anymore. I can’t fall asleep until 2am, even when I’ve got an 8am class. I don’t want to leave my house. And I blanked on my Math quiz today — something that’s completely unheard of — even though we’d been covering the exact same material only moments earlier. In short, I’m a mess.

The biggest challenge, right now, is finding people to help me through the grieving process. Everyone is so busy in their own lives, and what going on with me is so largely a secret that it’s difficult to just reach out to anyone at random. I know who my friends are — thanks to K. and V. and M. in particular — but it’s still hard to be so weak so frequently. It’s hard to deal with these things at 2am, when surely no one is awake to get my “I’m so sad and I can’t stop crying” text messages. I can only take a cue from the past and realize that it gets incrementally easier at some point, and there will be some day when I don’t think about the sadness at all. It’s extremely difficult, entering this second stage, to see when that will be. Faith in myself is what it takes, I suppose.