Coping...Or Trying To

"How are you doing?"
This is the question most asked during my day. While I greatly appreciate my friends and family calling and offering love and support, I don’t know how to answer this question. Or, rather, I don’t know how to answer it in a way that they want to hear. I’m not going to pretend that I’m fine. I’m not fine. I’m struggling to come to terms with all of this, and not doing a very good job. Yet, I don’t know if anyone really wants to hear the honest answer. So I’ll blog it.

How am I doing? Sometimes I can focus on work and other things going on in my life and in the lives around me. I can enjoy the beginning of baseball and appreciate the budding of the trees. But then there are moments when my throat burns with tears that I’m trying not to cry. There are times when I cry so hard that I can’t breathe. Time, like now, when I close my office door, put my head in my hands, and weep until my whole body aches. I cry because I can send letters every day, but won’t get a letter in response. I can hear her parents’ voices on the phone, but chances are I will never heard her voice again. So I cry until I can’t cry anymore. For the time being.

Other times, I am angry. Usually this is when I lie in bed at night, or when I’m riding on the bus, and I am lost in my own little world. I don’t want to wake or worry my parents, and I don’t want to seem crazy on the bus, so I remain silent. But inside I am screaming and yelling and tearing at my hair. And the only word that runs through my mind is, “Why?” Why, why, why, why, why, why? I don’t understand why this is happening, and why it is happening to Liz, my beautiful, wonderful Liz. I don’t understand why life is being snatched away from someone so good, while drug dealers, wife beaters and murderers roam the earth. I don’t understand why a mass murderer like Yassir Arafat, y”s, lived to old age and, barring a miracle, Liz will not. I don’t understand why I should merit such good health and a bright future, and Liz does not. I don’t understand and I can’t understand. Since I can’t scream out loud, I cry and scream on the inside, where only I can hear it.

I hate this. I hate it, I hate it, I hate it. And I’m powerless to stop it, and I hate that, too.

So how am I doing? Not so well. But I’m working on it.