Venting

Don't go see "Collateral Beauty". I know I menioned it before as a great movie for "us"...sigh...I am so damn stupid sometimes...still looking for answers when I know, deep down I know, there are no damn answers in this life. I'll tell you, it does end on a happy note, but it's a movie, and as my boyfriend Stephen Tyler sings, "Life's a Journey, Not a Destination." I also remember a quote from somewhere, by someone, something like, "Everyone's life can either be a fairy tale or a tragedy, depending on where you stop the story." Anyway, it brought up a lot of sadness I had been free from??? or avoiding??? Anyway, at a time like this, it isn't for a grieving mother, or at least not this one.

I didn't realise why I seem to do things to myself, to provoke the pain, to bring it to the surface and wallow in it. I think I understand a bit now. I am reading a book by Anerson Cooper, the blue-eyed silver haired journalist who also happens to be the son of Gloria Vanderbilt. Just like his mother, he had a priviledged life, as well as much sorrow. He lost his father to a heart attack when he was just 7 years old, and then when he was in college his older brother committed suicide. In front of their mother. He jumped off the balcony of her penthouse apartment. IN FRONT OF THEIR MOTHER. Anyway, he suppressed his feelings, then embarked on an extremely dangerous career filled with sorrow, destruction, pain, heartache...He wrote he needed equalibrium. He needed emotion, he needed his environment to match what he was feeling inside...and he needed to run. Boy, doesn't that sound familiar??? He has seen hundreds of thousands of corpses, wars, natural disasters...wherever the action is is where he wants to be. Living out his pain through the lives of people and experiences he reports on. Always on the move, trying to outrun his own pain, while also only feeling comfortable around the pain of others. After his brother did, he spoke of wishing he had lost an arm, had a scar, something, anything, that people could see, to understand, he was different. I got this huge tattoo on my left forearm for Cassi...Most of the time people don't ask what it means, but it can't be missed, at least they know SOMETHING traumatic has occurred, that I am not like them.

I knew it would come, the downswing after the upswing, and I know it will pass. That is life now. I just wish I could get it through my hard head that "Life's a journey, not a destination"...I am not going to find any answers, no matter how much I comb the sand for clues. I have to settle for the ups and downs, and for the god-awful not knowing why...why, why, why???

Anyway, as so many of us are more emotional this time of year, I just recommend you don't see the movie...and if it gets bad, call a hotline. They don't offer advice or answers, they just listen as you cry and rage and acknowledge that you have every right to.

I am still envious of most of you, with children and grandchildren...but I do have people in my life I am grateful for. It felt like a bomb had exploded and I had lost everything when I lost Cassi, but I can now look around and see that, yes, there is still beauty, collateral beauty, if you will...I have to be here, I might as wee at least try to find the beauty.