Twilight Zone

Although I’ve been doing pretty well this past week, yesterday I started having intrusively delusional and tragically inappropriate thoughts that maybe — okay, hear me out on this — I’m the one who is dead, not Sarah. That maybe, as if my life were a Twilight Zone episode or a Stephen King novel, I actually died last summer on my trip to New York State, and Sarah is still alive and living with Max and I’m really the one who is actually taking some kind of soul journey, with all these uncomfortable steps.

I really don’t know what this obsessive fantasy means or holds for me. I told Max about it, and he reassured me that I am, in fact, alive and we are living in our house together in Real Life. He said it would have been much worse if I had been the one who died instead of Sarah, since he could not have explained the situation to her, and he would have been left raising her alone and dealing with Polly, the mortgage, and everything else.

I think these weird, intrusive thoughts are one of the worst aspects of grief. They are so unsettling and they make me feel like I’m losing my mind and should possibly be taking anti-psychotic medication. Also, there doesn’t seem to be any sure bet that when I start to feel better, that upswing will just last and I will feel better and better and better. There’s no upward trend, no “turning the corner.” It’s very discouraging.