I took a couple days away from the blog to try and give myself a little time to let things settle in. As Jason correctly wrote, the real healing I get from this blog is minimal, and many times it can feel a little counter-productive to my trying to learn how to get back up after being knocked down so abruptly in October.
I’m fighting a two-front war. One is the most personal war within, in which I need to take steps to really admit to myself that David is, in fact, gone. And while my life has been upended, there will, in fact, be today, tomorrow, and the next day, and part of the process of healing is learning how to live without him in my life anymore. A large portion of that is letting go of events and realizing that while we were brothers, we are also two very different people… one of whom must go on and the other who decided he had had enough. It’s counter-intuitive, but essentially you need to put it to rest and let it be.
The second piece of this is the decision to start the Foundation and to constantly peel back the band-aid, pick at the scab over my heart, and continue to address what I am feeling but also share the pain and suffering I experience during every waking moment. You spend your time thinking about what the next event will be like, doing research on new depression treatments, staring at a 4-ft by 6-ft print of David’s face… you are constantly itching a scratch that should, for the most part, be left alone and not agitated.
In the end, I chose a more rocky and challenging road in that I still stand firm in the resolve to not have allowed David’s tragedy to have happened in vain, and to hopefully help at least a single person who is struggling with this thing called life in seeing that it can get better and that the alternative creates such devastation that lasts well after they are gone.
There’s a saying I liked to use that went something like: “Without any bitter, you’ll never be able to truly appreciate how sweet life really is.” Right now, my life is a giant Sour Patch Kid, and my tongue is raw from having eaten a bag of these the last few months.
I’ll try to be a little more diligent in the blog but hope that you will stick with me when I need to take a few days out for myself to do my healing, which includes letting David go for a couple days.
