Examining my Life

Each day is a new day even if it is exactly the same as all the other days. I wake up and go back to sleep until my head hurts more from staying in bed than from the painful thought of facing yet another dark empty day without Kuma.

I look over to where Kuma always slept beside me as if expecting her to miraculously be there. I reach out to touch her and pet her head in the air where she used to be. And everyday I realize that I am here and Kuma is not. On a positive note, I think to myself that this is now and somehouw I have gotten to now. I have made it this far, 5 months without Kuma.

But, to get this far in my life without Kuma has been the most painful and darkest struggle in my life.

I had no idea how much her death would hurt. The finality of her death hit me when her heart stopped. One moment she was breathing loudly and struggling to live and the next moment, nothing, she was gone forever. I immediately wanted to reverse and change everything I did before that moment. A large part of me died and I would have given everything I had, even my own life to go back and give Kuma a chance to live her full life. I knew Kuma was the most important thing in my life when she was alive, but I was unprepared for the intense feelings I started to experience after she was killed.

For the first few days then weeks, self preservation kept me from fully comprehending the reality of my new situation. Even though I experienced the most frightening anxiety pacing up and down in the garage for hours screaming her name and crying out for her each day and went outside for long long walks quietly hoping a car would hit me, I still did not feel the full brunt of the reality I would have to face. No, I still expected to see her, I still kept things the same putting our fresh water for her twice a day, feeding her cheese and talking to her like she was still there. I retraced everything we did and expected to see her there. No, as much as I hurt and screamed, I still had no idea how much it would really hurt later. No silly me, I started making plans and to do lists of how I would get back up on my feet. I started this just 3 days after Kuma died.

I tried pushing forward because this was the strong thing to do and I am a strong person. But, as I progressed what I thought was forward, I was being pulled back into more intense feelings.

The next few weeks were spent retracing all the steps and discoverying the 99 wrong turns that lead to Kuma's death. This was the first reality that hit me. Not only was Kuma dead but she should have been given the chance to live and should still be alive.

This lead me to examine why I let this happen. Not only did I go through every single day of her diary notes and read every text and email that I sent to people up to a year earlier, I researched for months the medications Kuma was put on and the ailments she was experiencing. I studied her medical records and began to understand what was happening to Kuma and why only I could have stopped it.

After I examined all the physical reasons that Kuma was killed, I began to look into my own life of how I let this happen. What I saw was a lifetime of similar behaviour where I would just hope for the best and not react and in fact not even realize the severity of the situation. It was then that I screamed out that I hate myself. I saw my entire past as being a person that I despised. I hated myself now and even more so who I was in the past.

Next as I started questioning what was real, what were my beliefs about life and death. I started spiralling into an abyss of darkness. All enjoyment of life left me. There was nothing I wanted from life anymore. Retreating into this darkness did a few things for me. I no longer went for walks and didn't breath fresh air or see the sky or nature at all. I went from no socialization to complete isolation for days on end. I lost track of time and days.

I didn't want to live but I didn't want to end my life either. When I thought of ending my life, I didn't want to hurt anyone who found me. I know people who have been emotionally scarred for life through someone's suicide and I didn't want to do that to anyone. I promised myself that I would give it a year to see how I felt. I would have to live it out.

My life seemed to come to an end. Looking back I felt that I had done it all. I had a family, two houses on the water, a boat on the ocean, nice cars, a great business, a 23 year relationship with my best friend, a great gym, I experienced a deep emotional love with my daughter and a deep genuine love with my girlfriend and the most loving and caring relationship with my dog Kuma. All these things came to an end. It was as if my life was a pleasant vacation and the vacation now came to an end. It was over. I dropped out of life completely and had no desire to begin everything all over again.

Why not? This was as good a time to end my life vacation as any. What difference would it make if I lived another 15 or 20 years. They would all just be a struggle and I didn't have the energy or desire to repeat what I have already done. After all, at 62 am I going to look for a girlfreind to love and marry? Am I going to start a new business? Am I going to develop a whole new social circle? Am I going to get a new dog and begin another 17 years of memories just to lose them again? Any future that I could even try to imagine would be a future of daily pain of living without Kuma, living without love.

But then a friend of mine said something that opened my outlook a bit. He said, "Everything is possible". More on this later.

Reading my own diaries I came across a list of 23 questions I layed out for myself. These were really hard questions about my life. The first question asked why did I love my dog so much and why was I so afraid of losing her. At the same time I took a silly quiz on the internet to see what were my greatest fears that were crippling my future. The answer was a fear that most people have, the fear of not being liked or accepted, the fear of abandonment.

My Fear of Abandonment?

Whoa, really? Well let's see. I know that I was afraid of losing Kuma because she was all I had left. Kuma stayed with me after I had lost everything, divorced and lost my family, lost my 23 year old business, my two houses were taken from me and both were demolished, my best friiend of 23 years betrayed and stole money from me, lost my gym and my equipment was held at ransom for a year and then 25% of it was stolen, my daughter left me alone when I started falling down, my girlfreind and best friend lost hope in me, my family lost respect for me and disappeared. No wonder I was afraid to lose Kuma. She was the only connection I had left to life, to love, to caring. Yes, I was afraid to lose Kuma. But this fear started much earlier.

My earliest memories as a child were when my parents separated and my sister and I lived with my mother. To punish me my mother threatened to go away "far from the world's eyes", then she would leave to go to night school. I remember screaming with tears of fear that she would never return and I would be left alone. As I got older her punishement changed to "because of that, I will not speak to you for a week". Again, I remember pleading with her to "please talk to me" while she pretended that I didn't exist. To add to this, my father, who my mother threw out for cheating on her, came to visit every day from when I was 6 years old until I was 13. He was not allowed in the house, instead I went out to sit with him in the car while he told me how bad my mother was and how easy it would be to run someone over with a car and make it look like an accident. Through these years I remember leaving his car crying every single time. I remember having recurring nightmares where I saw an ambulance, police and crowds of people around a car accident. I was always running screaming to the accident to find my mother. I loved both my parents but they were too young to understand how their anger toward each other was being taken out on me. When I look back on all this, it is no wonder to me that I am afraid of losing something that I love. And that this fear has been part of why I held on so tight that I pushed people away. Everyone except Kuma. Kuma stayed. Kuma lived to be with me. The last time I travelled and left her with my girlfriend, she cried for two days non stop. That was 3 years ago and I have never left Kuma since.

When I look back, I understand better why I get so emotionally attached in relationships and why I fear losing them. I understand why I tend to have intense one on one relationships rather than be part of a social group. I understand also why I tend to want to do things with someone rather than alone, why I enjoyed individual sports instead of team sports. Running my consulting business, the gym and enjoying my homes were all things I enjoyed doing with someone. When that someone left, I lost the desire and enjoyement of continuing those things. Alone, everything just went cold and I stopped caring.

Kuma became the same. When she was young, Kuma was a very social being. She was happiest among people. When she entered a room, she went to each person individually to say hello. But, one by one, Kuma lost the people she loved as well. She was abandoned and forgotten by everyone and spent the last three years of her life alone with me. When she got an occasional visit from Marie and Mackie boy or when she went to her last powerlifting competition, she was more energetic and happy for three days after. It was very noticable. And, it was very sad to see how people just stopped and forgot about her. Kuma became very attached to me for her life.

Kuma lived to be with me and I lived to be with Kuma.

For the past 5 months, I have gotten up out of bed and was amazed to still be alive without Kuma. I have lost everything else and everyone else and now I have lost Kuma and each day it becomes more of a reality. I will have to live the rest of my life without her.

Examining other parts of my life

My priorities in life have changed. Beyond wanting to be with Kuma, I still don't know what I want to do in life, what is important to me. I have examined what I believe in and that has hit a brick wall. I have looked at who my friends are and realized who really cares.

I read my goals in life from over 20 years ago and realized that today they are still mostly the same. I just keep going around in very large circles and repeating the same mistakes in life without ever understanding why or how to correct them. In some way I am more realistic in my life, but I have not improved in things that were important 20 years ago. What is the point then of continuing if I don't stop and change course.

For the past 5 months I have looked backward into myself and I have studied more on the internet than at any other time in my life. I have dived into trying to understand quantum mechanics and understand the confusion and speculation that has been going on in the study of sub atomic particles in areas as minute as string theory which are only visible in mathematics. I finally stopped researching why they think that conaciousness affects the behaviour of whether it is a particle or a wave when I came to the conclusion that since 1930, they still don't know themselves and its all just speculation. I have tried to understand the infinity of the cosmos, the universe being flat but curved, the vastness of the universe continuously growing exponencially, waves reaching us from 1.4 billion light years away and I have come to the conclusion that this is just all too much to try to understand. I have searched through the physics and philosophy of time and space. I have explored, dreams, the possibility of consciousness surviving death, reality, spirituality, experiences of life after death, out of body experiences, parallel or multiuniverses and a host of other subjects that just explode my mind. In each area there are speicalist who have devoted their entire lives to studying a minute aspect and yet nobody knows and nobody has come up with the answers that I have been looking for. Nobody has yet anwered where Kuma went and how can I be with her again.

Each day the reality hits harder telling me that I will never see or be with Kuma again. Everything that lies ahead of me will be without Kuma.

I have stopped looking. The closest answer that I can come up with now is that whatever we believe is true for us.

The past few weeks, I have numbed myself binge watching TV episodes. So far I watched 5 seasons of The Office and 8 seasons of How I Met Your Mother. It takes me out of reality. I get to live inside the TV show with the characters in it. And when I shut it down, reality is still here only harder. Kuma is not here and I will never see her again.