To My Folks,
Two hundred and forty-five pounds of sadness, death, and unsustainable relationships, searching in all the wrong spaces for something I wouldn’t recognize if God, Himself, delivered it to me in the flesh. High blood pressure, job loss, and then I lost my mother…The full impact has yet to be understood.
I was able to fulfill a promise I made to my mother and myself. She would not die alone in a nursing home like her mother, but the promise to lose weight made things complicated. I spent a year and a half, lying, eating and sleeping on a couch, not because I had to, but because depression had a grip on me.
I knew depression. We had been well acquainted over my lifetime. At times, I would give it different names. The first and most damaging was the “Winter depression.” My grandmother died in November of 1972; I was 11yrs old. The next year my great grandmother died in November of 1973. Many years later, I haven’t gotten over the deaths of these two women.
I lived with two very kind, protective and loving parents, but my grandmother was everything to me. I don’t have any early memories that didn’t include her. She got me. She knew who I was at the core, and she could see my spirit. She was my first teacher and she tried to give me all that I would need for a journey through life without her. Nonetheless, I miss her so much. I still mourn her death and struggle with comprehending a life without her, and at times I find myself crying and reliving the unbearable pain of her loss.
My grandmother and her mother gave me God. Without that gift, I don’t know if I would have made it to this point in my life. Self-harm wears many faces; it’s a wonder how I got over. The wonder, however, is wrapped in the love of the Creator. When the Universe loves you and you allow that love to comfort and guide you, then life will bless you with the wherewithal to still get things right – to return to health.
Much Love,
