By Doug Forbes

I won’t be able to adequately describe how sick I feel right now. If I could paint it, it might look like the above photo.

But here goes…

My entire body buzzes. My ears ring. My stomach is inside out. Nausea. Hands trembling. A sense of dread. Borderline panic attack. Yet something altogether different.

I am also severely sleep-deprived. And my body and brain are trying to determine how to best notify me that this is unsustainable. Barely a pinch of gas left in the tank.

——————-

I had to take a break from writing this, because I did, in fact, have a panic attack. I rushed out of the house with my wife in order to try to mitigate the angst.

Yes, there’s the breathing problem and the heart attack replication, but I’ve had these things before. I know how it goes. That’s not what got me this time. What got me was the noise—the electrical traffic jam in my head.

I felt like I was disappearing. And I wasn’t sure I could find my way back. Grief was winning. It was killing me.

But we walked and walked some more. And I was able to find the escape hatch back to some semblance of here and now. That said, I lost something just now. I lost a little battle that I’m not yet able to describe.

This has now become a battle of will. My little girl, my baby, is haunting me. Yet all I want her to do is bring me joy, lift my spirits, push me to make important change, remind me how glorious the parenting life was, no matter how challenging some of the chapters were.

Building this website is grueling. But building my positive memory muscle is a beyond-brutal exercise.

I want to embrace all that I had with my beloved Roxie. And yet I feel as if I don’t shut her down in some way, I might not be able to function in a way that honors her. I might not be able to function at all.