Karma

Apparently I "choose to suffer." My former shrink tried to teach me that suffering is a choice. I think she was referring to that yogic practice of 'staying in the moment'. Yogis believe that suffering is found in the train trip to the past and the obsession with the future. If you stay in the moment, you can find it to be suffering free. Don't know about you, but my moments can make me suffer pretty good. It is heart breaking and wrenching to watch someone you love fade away, filled with anxiety and angst.
In literature Altzheimer's is frequently referred to as "the long goodbye." Here in this house, it is and it isn't. I suppose this loss is longer than a car accident which can take someone immediately, but it feels really fast. After the initial strangeness of diagnosis and the stages of denial settled down, I peered over the top of that particular nasty pudding, and he was gone. A skinny old version, a stand-in clone, an apparition less fun and lots more trouble had taken his place. That feels fast, sudden.
And in other ways it is a grinding, never ending assembly line of pain and loss. Like Lucy Riccardo, I am dropping and breaking most of what I am dealt.
So one of the many painful things I am learning is that I am not good at this. I remain obsessed with my own losses and not enough about his! I am already worn out emotionally, and though I yearn for a nice waltz, I fear we have just begun this polka.
And we appear to be dancing separately.