Athena: Denial

Augustine,

The first night, I hardly slept. I kept waking up to the smallest noise and realizing that I had not just had a nightmare...that it was real. And there was no going back or redoing it.

And I'm watching protests and seeing frantic petitions of impeachment or please to the electoral college. And I get it. I desperately want a redo. This whole election cycle has deeply shaken my faith in democracy.

I'm not sure what it is about grief that prompts denial, but I think it's actually the hardest part of the whole process for me. It's this feeling of numbness that washes over me over few hours as I realize: No. That actually happened. That's real. That's reality now.

Today, I coped with it by sitting in my dark room (I have black curtains to help block light in the mornings) and just listening to Frasier, trying to catch up on the sleep debt I've accrued. When my godfather died last year, I would just burst into tears every few hours, trying to process how this could possibly be real.

With death, there's a body or at least a casket. There's a funeral and a time set aside to go and grieve. There's people you can be with. There's some sense of closure. With divorce, there's some finality: somebody moves out [you learn to adjust to a new 'normal'], there's an official signing of papers at some point. But there's so much ambiguity too--so many things linger on, and the whole process takes months or even years. There's no one moment you set aside to grieve. My Nan's husband has Alzheimer's. The West Wing did an episode on that with CJ and her dad, "The Long Goodbye." That's exactly what it is...this just slipping away and erosion over time, a loss that waxes and wanes over time, so that you never get to fully STOP and deal with it. There's no stopping here too, and I almost wish there was. At least there's a community to grieve with.

And now this. And as terrible as it feels, it doesn't feel real yet, because there are blessedly two months left of 2016. In which President Obama still resides in the Oval Office, lamed by the countdown of the days and a Congress eager to obstruct him at every turn.

I get to live in denial until things are official. Until the Electoral College votes. Until he is sworn in. I'm trying not to--I'm trying to reach out to people, to make plans, to be shrewd and have important conversations in the moments when I'm not overwhelmed. But I also escape (I'm watching HIMYM, and though it's not my favorite comedy ever, it's making me laugh, which I needed so desperately) and I live in denial and though it prolongs things, delays, it makes things painful too.

With death or divorce or Alzheimer's...there's a sadness but it's an absence. And this is different here too, because this isn't one moment of grief to move on from. This is four years of potential grief waiting in the wings, of wounds waiting to be inflicted and ripped open.

At least that's how it feels today. Thus, I'd like to live in my denial a little bit longer.

+Athena