A Week Ago Today

Originally posted by me as dakotaismyson February 27, 2020

Dakota looking back

I write all of these in the morning; always talking about the day prior. A week ago today – just after midnight on the 19th (so, 12:23 a.m. on the 20th) is when my son hung up the phone and this nightmare started. I feel like such a broken record… I just say the same things over and over… ask the same questions… make the same wishes… apologize to people for the circumstance we are in or “thanks but no thanks” their offers of help. Sometimes – like right now – I get this stabbing kind of physical pain in my heart and I wonder if I’ve had enough and the agony of all of this is just going to kill me.

I don’t understand. I think Dakota’s family members have each said that or a similar phrase hundreds upon hundreds of times. We’ll likely end up saying it thousands before we realize we will never understand. If my son knew that this would hurt us all this badly, would he have gone through with this? I have had bouts of depression throughout my life but I’ve never had depression. Bouts like right now, which I believe qualifies, but I’m also in my 4th marriage so I have had other periods of turmoil and depression and anxiety. I think people who don’t suffer from depression can’t understand what depression really is. I bet the bouts we deal with throughout life are nothing like clinical depression. We are the types who believe happiness is a choice, circumstances will always shift, and when there’s no factors affecting someone they should just ‘snap out’ of it. Its not us trying to be callous or crass, it’s just that we don’t understand how depression (for someone else) can be so different from our own.

My daughter said yesterday that you can sum up millennials in 3 words: social media, depression. She said that being so disconnected with people because of social media (which feels sort of contradictory?) promotes depression. I told her I didn’t know if that was 100% true. Each generation feels like their generation has new feelings, new ideas, new agonies, and new resolutions. The technology and slang may be different, but the challenges of being a person really haven’t changed. We all still need the same physiological things… the same psychological things. We all still struggle to either fit in or to stand out, to make friends, to find love, to handle loss, to be aghast at the state of the world, to love the beauty we can find in our world, to detest people, to applaud mankind, and so on. Those are timeless. The main difference is, in this digital era, a few keystrokes with my thumbs and click the social media beast is fed.

I don’t intend on writing in this every single day… likely starting next week. Dakota would have warned you that I’m a “planner” type. He used to laugh at me because I insist on taking a highlighter on a cruise so I can plan out the options for the day (pink for “me”, yellow for “the family”). I have so many memories, yet no where near enough with my son. My kids have always known that I do my best not to judge them, to let them be their own people, to let them make their own decisions so they can understand their successes and mistakes. I thought I was a good mom… no June Cleaver but still not too shabby. Their dad got to be the fun one and I had to be the parent… and I had to make up a bit for my ex (who had the parenting skills of a guppie) but I really thought I was a decent mom. I guess what I used to think about myself and how I feel now are different. A good mom wouldn’t have been so obtuse, right? So clueless. I should have read more on depression so I could understand signs. Maybe I didn’t notice them because I’m an idiot in that topic. Maybe they were all over the place and I was blind.

UGH… there I went again, distracted and down a rabbit trail.

I will likely write daily until his memorial service this week… but after that, I’ll write when the need to empty my brain hits. I’m still in that “proactively” dump it out right now with some hope of getting through each day. I admit that I am getting a bit more sleep, I was able to keep down/in some food, and there may be a slight decrease in breakdowns (but I haven’t been counting those).

Life has a way of always throwing more at us and even with this tragedy my life is no different… it’s just the first time some chaos may be a good distraction rather than a reason to cuss a lot. This new ‘chaos’ means a lot of manual labor in the yard (something Dakota totally would have been a great help with).

I miss my son. I’d trade my world for more time with him. I love that kid so darn much.