I can't sleep. I've tried several times. My heart aches, and my stomach hurts, my mind is spinning, and my eyes feel tired. The sun is rising, though the moon was so bright it hardly looks any different.

This past week has been one to reflect on why I try so hard, even though I know the answer as to why. It has also been a week to reflect on life itself, after having lost 3 dear people all under 63 years old and one fur-baby-in-law in 3 weeks.

I feel in shock over so much of it. I feel uneasy, as if life itself will slip from my own fingers. I can't pay attention to the news anymore because it just feels like it is adding to the devastation I feel.

Among those lost:
A very dear instructor, whose classes I never took, but who I knew very well and who was the kind of person you would learn something about yourself and the world each time you heard him speak or spoke with him. He was a key person in my considering counseling as a profession because he loved it so much and did it so uniquely his own way. Then my boyfriend's sister had to put her dying cat to sleep to ease his pain from liver failure. He was a hilarious cat, with a huge heart, and a funny personality. I'd known him 5 of his 12 years. Then yesterday two people who meant a lot to me died. One was my sister's father-in-law, who was ill but died unexpectedly fast. He was the person I talked with the most at her wedding, and he helped me feel less anxious. He told me I was family, and he had a similar childhood as mine, and he gave me his #, which I never called. But I did add him on fb, and knew him. And later that same day it was announced the R0b!n W!ll!ams died.

My sister is also getting divorced, and I haven't heard a thing about my internsh!p.

I also witnessed an injured finch in the road who I could not rescue, and that was incredibly painful and helpless for me.

My stomach hurts. I can't process loss without feeling alone and vulnerable.

As a child growing up without family except my mom, I clung to people in deep and unusual ways. Celebrities and anyone in my life who was kind were my extended family. Movies filled my broken heart with happiness.

I was 4 years old when I remember watching R0b!n W!ll!ams on a 13� portable black and white tv. It was capable of 13 channels, and had a uhf channel. The antenna was a wire hanger.

I often think of that TV when my $39 digital antenna fails to keep a hold of reception. 30 years ago a wire hanger did the job much better.

So, my childhood was anything but happy. It had happy moments, but my life was very secretive, frightening, lonely, and impoverished. I escaped in my imagination, and I escaped in books, and I escaped in TV.

R0b!n was always part of that positivity I lacked. There were many days when he alone made me smile. Yesterday was the first time he made me cry.

Upon hearing of his death, my heart was already aching at the losses. But the ache now really hurts. R0b!n had a kindness about him that one only gets from having suffered in life. I recognized it as similar to my own; a longing to fit in but never quite feeling it. A vulnerability of having been broken by life and his comedy was his attempt to reconstruct life in a way that was bearable.

I wish I could say something profound about suicide, having experienced that feeling so often. There just aren't words to accurately express it. It's a desperate feeling, as if you no longer belong, you no longer have value, you no longer have purpose, along with a desire to stop, to let go, to release...and its a letting go to such an extent that you have faith that everyone around you will be better without you, which is never actually true. I still have those moments occasionally. I cannot say that I never will or would. I know that there are things in life that could drive me to it. I know I am vulnerable, and desperate, and lonely, and broken. At the moment there are things I feel connected to enough to cling to this life, even if merely to appreciate the butterflies and the moments when my boyfriend wraps his arm around me in the middle of the night and I can hear his heart beating. I am painfully aware that one day it will stop. I am afraid to love deeply, but it is happening despite my fear of it. It may just kill me someday. But at the moment, it is making the living part a little more bearable.

~e