Poem for a dead lover.

I wrote this in the mid 90's about the death of Timothy Joseph Hanson.

Season of Sleep

The world is growing cold with the
Approach of winter.
It is time for the trees to go to sleep for now
And you, my love, to go to sleep forever.
You who were the fountain of beautiful
Chaos in my life, are now gone.
I do not know how to tell you good-bye
Nor can I properly express the depth
Of emotion to which you are attached.
I will never be the same for this.

The golden leaves fall from the trees and remind
Me of another time when you and I drove through the
City filled with the grief for another lost friend.
That time is gone, now it is I driving
Alone in waves of pain.
How do these things happen?
Who is it that decides on this horror?
I thought I knew, but I am more confused.
So, the trees will sleep and so shall you.
The only difference is that they shall rise in the spring,
But you, my love, will not.

Life

I don't experience life as an event. I experience it as a cascade.
If someone or something makes me happy I experience that happiness compounded with a flood of memories of everytime I have been made happy. It is truly glorious. It stops time and I live in that beautiful moment for, what seems like, an eternity.
The downside is that when negative things or people appear in my life they, too, cause a cascade. I am trapped in a moment of perfect horror. Forced to re-remember and re-live every single moment of that emotion that has ever happened in my life. All I can do is live through the waves of pain and try not to get lost in the cascade.
The recent death of a friend has had me trapped in such a cascade. I have been experiencing the moment that I was told she died over and over again mixed up with every single death that I have experienced in my life. All just as real as the current event and all happening right now.
At the moment of being told of her death I was there receiving the the tragic news but I was also out for a walk being told of my mothers death and sitting at my desk at Offutt Air Force Base being told that Tim had died.
At her funeral I was at every funeral that I have ever been to. I saw her laying in her coffin with overlays of my mother, Tim, Danny, and others that I don't have any conscience memories of.
I try very hard to live in the moment, the real world that is happening around me right now. I can't control the cascades. They happen again and again I have to let them run their own course. Maybe every one experiences life this way, I don't know, but this re-experiencing, re-living makes life very hard to get through.
I love the positive cascades because they magnify the moment and make the moment bigger than it really is. But the negative ones, also, magnify the moment trapping me in a moment of perfect terror. I could very much do without those.

My Mother

My mother died on July the 16th of 2016. That is a fact and I can deal on one level or another with simple facts. They have no more power over me than any other fact in my life. Like the fact that the walls of my home are solid. I can see this very simply by looking out the window and seeing that the wind is blowing very hard outside but I am protected by my walls.

What I can't deal with is when the facts illicit emotions. I am unprepared for the strain of feeling emotions. The people around me tend to forget that, emotionally, I am only 5 years old. Five year old emotions locked in a 55 year old body. I have a lot of knowledge concerning all sorts of subjects, but I lack the wisdom that is supposed to come with age to use it properly. It is like I am reading a book about doing home repairs but the pictures in the book do not match what I am seeing in my home.

At the time of her death I relied totally on my mother to get me through literally everything. I am not just talking about the material things like a roof over my head and food in my kitchen, but she told me how to act and react to the world. I had a person that came into my home and bathed me and cleaned up for me. When forced to deal with the world on my own I would run away to my apartment and wait for my mother to make things right. Because I had her to make the world safe for me I didn't grow up.

When she died I was so lost and alone that I became the only thing I could to protect myself. I became rage. I lashed out at anything or anyone that tried to change my world. All rational thought was banished from my mind and I was on the attack 24/7. I wanted everything to be like it had been, but most of all I wanted my mom to come back. I didn't understand that she could not come back from death. Why not I had done it so many times, so if she truly loved me she should be able to do that, right? So I waited for her to come back and during that time of waiting I lost everything. I lost my home and my cat. I had and was nothing.

Well not quite nothing because I had Google to keep me company. I started listening to the suggestions from the map program about taking pictures of where I was. During January through March of 2017 I wandered blindly around the city taking pictures and uploading them to Google maps. For a time while I was homeless I gladly allowed Google to replace what I had lost. I would take my pictures and upload them. I would even be given rewards for each picture in the form of points towards the local guide program. I didn't have a place to sleep or food to eat but I had my pictures. I slowly began to forget that I had been anything else. In my mind I had always been out there just taking my pictures and uploading them. I wasn't happy, but I was content.

This lasted until the third time I was beaten in the park where I lived. I was in serious need of repair and had to clue how to get that accomplished. I knew that I could not trust people because the world had shown me that. Both feet were broken and I could not walk on them without extreme pain. That morning a man saw me trying to get up and offered to help me. I lashed out at him with a diatribe of hateful words that had worked for me in the past to keep humans away from me, but he persisted. I do not know who he was only that he was an APD officer and that he could take me someplace to get the repairs I needed. Something inside me broke when he asked about my family and at that moment I felt destroyed. I remembered everything I had lost, but largest in my mind was that my mother was dead. I decided, at that moment, that I would give this nameless man my trust, because my mother had trusted a man like him before and not been hurt for that trust.

I still have massive problems dealing with emotions. Through various means I have been informed that even if I can't recall every traumatic event from my past, on some level my mind does remember and reacts to outside stimulus telling my body what it must do to stay safe. No matter how many times I am told that death is permanent, I still refuse to believe that it is final. I have survived death so many times that I feel anyone should be able to. What I do know is that my mother didn't survive her death and now she is gone from my world.

I wrote this on the second anniversary of her death.

Mother's Day

July the 16th is when I celebrate Mother's Day. That is the day my mother died. I was not allowed to be part of her life during the last six months of her life. She was my mother and my advocate. She helped me to navigate through the world because I was lost. I didn't even remember that she was my mother all the time. I just knew that this nice lady would come over and take me places. She always believed in me and made the world safe for me. The level of cruelty involved in the decision that I should not be allowed to see her is astronomical. She was literally all I had. 

Death of a Friend

All my friends are beautiful. When I decide that someone is a friend their whole aspect changes in my eyes. I don't know when I first noticed this but I know that if you are a friend of mine I easily look past all your shortcomings and see what I want to see.  This could be a function of the TBI, an easy simplification of the complex world for my minds assimilation. It could, also, be how it is for everyone, we see the people and things we like bathed in the light of beauty. I have never discussed this with anyone, because as I have said I don't understand people so I tend to avoid them. Those few who have, through one means or another, entered my life are changed in my eyes.

On the 28th of October my life lost one of it's glowing lights. Tiffany Martin was killed by being run down with a car. She was only 27 and was one of the very few people that I had offered sanctuary in my home if she ever needed it. To say that she was beautiful if an understatement. She, literally,  walked in beauty. She was always a breath of sunlight and peace when she entered my home.

She sought sanctuary in my home only three times and I gave it freely. I never asked why she felt the need, I simply gave her what she wanted. 

She loved the picture books that I have collected of great architectural masterpieces from around the world and pretty pebbles that I had gathered. We would sit in long silences enjoying each others company. She liked sugar in her coffee and enjoyed the high caffeine brews that I favor. She, also, enjoyed looking at the pictures that I had taken of various buildings and flowering plants around Albuquerque. I have great trouble relating to others, but for her I made an extra effort and it was very much worth the effort. 

To say that I am saddened by this death is not doing justice to the feelings involved. I can not properly express the level of feeling I attached to this one life. If all my friends are lights in my life, then she, surly, was one of the greatest lights. Her lovely smile is sorely missed in my life. I am much reduced by this loss.

In loving memory of my friend Tiffany.