Behind Blue Eyes

When all else eases a little, guilt keeps on building up. We wonder what we could have said or done differently. We tell ourselves that if we had kept them talking a little longer, they would not have been at that red light at that exact time. If we had taken them to the doctor sooner. If we had listened closer we would have heard their cry for help or felt, intuitively, that something awful was coming and been able to prevent it. The thought that if we had looked behind their eyes, we would have known. Our loved one is gone because we were not up there with god/gods and been all knowing, all aware. If we had done something, anything, they would still be here. In this frame of mind, we refuse to be comforted. We wrap the guilt around us as though it were an insulated blanket, not allowing anything to soothe our guilty soul. We let it eat at us and erode us minute by minute. There is no comfort for the guilty.

Many of us have lived almost our whole lives with people who are tormented. Be it bi-polar, depression, alcoholism, drugs, or an endless list of afflictions, we become, early on, use to that way of life. It becomes normal. Even in it's normality, we fight for our loved ones everyday. Yet, when that fight has ended, we always feel we did not do enough. When we lose someone, no matter the manner of passing, we feel we did not take that last step to save them. We cannot conceive nor believe that saving them was not within our powers. We just became lazy, tired, fed up and in a moment, they were gone. Not true. Even the fight becomes normal so in its complacency we will feel we failed them. We did not fail them though and they did not fail us.

The anger and rage are the easiest to hold on to. They burn so hot and bright they push down the other, more complicated emotions of disbelief and sorrow. We have ourselves to rage at, to blame. We feed those flames and keep that fire burning. Maybe that is as it should be. I don't know. I do know that when the sorrow gets too much to bear, I let the rage take center stage. It dampens the hurt a touch for a little while. I know too that I will have to let that rage go one day. Some, with more knowledge than I, say that it is not healthy. Physically, it may not be. It will wear down ones health. Emotionally? I am not so sure.

My son, Tim, took his own life. I won't go into the depth of it but to say that the last months of his life were more tormenting for him than all of his 34 years. There were layers and layers that lead to that last moment and others involved. My rage is not at him. I lived those months with him. Still, I am only human. I could not believe he would choose to leave. I cannot blame him that he did. I do not rage at myself for not being more aware, I could not know what was really going on behind those blue eyes. I do know that love alone is not enough, if it were, no one would ever die again.

We will never know if there was some magic word or action that would have saved the ones we love. We can convince ourselves that there had to have been something and we missed it. We can wrap ourselves in that blanket of guilt and live in worse misery everyday until our time comes. Without the absolute truth of what was happening inside them, without the fore-knowledge of someone else's actions that caused their death, without a big screen playing in our heads to show us what was coming, we take on the guilt anyway. Could we have saved them? For how long and at what cost to them. What were we willing to condemn them to, just to keep them, physically, with us? All of it is too complicated. We simplify by judging ourselves guilty.