I realized something this past Sunday evening. No matter how many healthy habits, fun events, and amazing people I fill my life with, I cannot make my tragedy go away.  Basically, I can’t run away from myself. I knew that. Really. However, you can’t blame me for continuing to try.

Coming back from Bend, one of my happy and peaceful places, having had an amazing weekend, I started having an anxiety attack about 45-60 minutes from my house. I breathed deep, trying to stave it off, wondering, what the hell, I just had a great weekend, can’t I just enjoy the remnants of that? Nope. My heart beat hard in my chest, I fought to take that deep breath while my thoughts were on this precipice of disaster, threatening to ruin all things good that had occurred. I focused on the podcast we were listening to, then the music. I think that it did not help that we are having one of the coldest and wettest winters on record here. In Bend, there was sun.  Coming back over the mountain it was like driving into this black wall of doom and gloom. The reality of it though was not that. It was coming home.

I wrote about recognizing something you are grateful for everyday and how it can change your brain chemistry.  It does most of the time for me, however, try as I may with this, it just ends up in this juxtaposition, which has been the theme of grief from murder-suicide. I have said time and time again when asked “how are you doing in your grief?” My response,”it’s complicated.” This house. Is great, sweet, has charm, an amazing backyard, and has challenges that come with an old home (1910). I am grateful to have a place to live. I focus on all the things around that. Then I remember why I am here. Jesse killed Bella then himself in our home. I left the night of May 8, 2014 and never lived there again. I walked away from our life, our home, the place where Bella was born, that horrific night. I luckily had a place to stay in the interim until we found this house. When I am away I am not immersed in the place I had to go to because of the tragedy. I obviously can tune that statement out on a day to day basis and it normally does not creep in most of the time. However, it is pronounced when I am away and come back.  Not always. But mostly. This was the case two days ago.

Hope and I have a tenuous relationship at best. It is human nature to have and want it. I often have it, but since the tragedy, I will have a hope, immediately followed by a thought that why on earth would that work out. Much like tuning out my house and its associations, I work on this as well. One cannot exist without hope. It is as natural as the breath we take. Even the slightest “hope” of “I hope the sun comes out soon.” “I hope my basement does not leak again with this rain.” (yes, it has been raining a lot) Bigger hopes, “I hope that I can do more public speaking regarding suicide prevention.”  “I hope my anxiety and PTSD gets better.” You get the picture. There is that nag though. Some of the nag is true. I can hope my anxiety and PTSD will get better, but it may not.  The reality is I witnessed what I witnessed, that cannot be undone.  That caused a cascade of changes within my body and brain. Do I work on minimizing the damage from it, hell yes. Can I make those images go away completely. Nope. But that does not need to have a blanket effect on the rest of my life regarding hope. Like I said, to hope is as natural as breathing. Even if you say something like, I am not hoping for anything anymore, please realize that is not a long term sustainable goal. We hope all the time even for the simplest things, like many of the examples above.  I realize too that it is natural after a loss or tragedy in your life to be hopeless. I get it. But I also have “got” after time, that we can’t not hope. Let the simple hopes come back in. Even if it is going to the store and hoping that thing is still on sale. Eventually the hope will become bigger again, more natural. It is normal for hopes to be dashed sometimes, and it is normal for some hopes to come true. For me, I will not give up on hope, I will also acknowledge and  recognize the nag that comes along with it. And, I will hope the nag eventually goes away.

From snow shoeing this past weekend, one of the many amazing things that happened