Why so silent

It's been an uncharacteristically quiet week at the keyboard for me. Not a lot of blogging here. Inbound personal emails piling up in the inbox. Social media channels like Twitter and Facebook gathering dust.

On the one hand, I haven't had the time. We got home late Monday and immediately dove into work and school. Not easy when your head isn't in the game, and every conversation you have with folks back home threatens to plunge you right back into the darkness from which you still haven't fully emerged and likely won't for months.

On the other hand, I haven't had the will. As cathartic as writing has always been to me, this time has proven somewhat different. I just haven't been able to push past the gloom to get myself to my laptop and flip it open. Or I'd reach that point, then stare at the blinking cursor, unsure of what I wanted to say. The words weren't flowing in my head as they usually do.

I've felt that my energy was needed elsewhere. Unlike three-ish years ago when we lost my dad, this wasn't my loss. She was my wife's mom, not mine. And I somehow thought that this would be a mitigating factor of sorts, a means of allowing me to stand slightly on the outside and freely help in any way I could. Instead, I felt weak, unable to be the rooted pillar I intended to be, unsure if anything I was doing was the "right" thing to do for those around me.

So I've been wrestling with the seemingly divergent perspective that I shouldn't be mourning as I am because she wasn't my mom, yet feeling like I've been hit by the grieving equivalent of a freight train because I called her mom, because she was so close to my wife, because in her own way she managed to weave her way around my life from the first moment I wandered into her home as a naïve 17-year-old, because she was a towering figure to our kids, because I don't know if I've been a good enough guide to our kids through this all, because I needed to do what I could for my father-in-law, because none of this should be about me, because...well, I could probably write reasons like this indefinitely.

Or maybe it was because I couldn't - and still can't - find the right words to make my wife smile. And after years of mentally preparing myself for this - sorry, but I think we all somehow churn future-thoughts like this even if we subsequently bury them deeply out of morbid guilt - I ended up rocked by my inability to simply write a script and follow it.

Because life has no script, and none of this was ever meant to be simple.