Love, Justine

Women’s Center

August 28th, 2017

Monday

All my hair is falling out. Super annoying. I’m reading a book called “When the Bough Breaks: Forever After the Death of a Son or Daughter.” What about both? It’s by Judith R. Bernstein, Ph.D. She and her husband are both psychologists who lost their son at 25 to cancer. I wish my kids had lived long, healthy lives–even 25 seems very long compared to three and seven months.

I was supposed to go to Coudersport for bloodwork today, but the Big Boss didn’t put it on the schedule. Time for painting with Jenny–the same woman who does “church.” We’re watching Intervention.

1pm

Now I’m reading my book again. It’s pretty good. It says, “The bereaved parent has to come to terms with a world in which it is possible for children to die; a world of different hopes and dreams, a world of muted sunsets. The victim never sees life through the same lens again.”

Spot on.

I looked in the front of this book and saw the name of a local woman who lost a daughter to a suicide in jail. Horrific. She must have donated the book to the Center. I hope it helped her. I can’t imagine.

Judith Bernstein calls the “aftermath of the trauma of intense grief “a barren, inhospitable wasteland.” I like her. At least she is able to express herself without the uncontrollable rage that I experienced when writing my first book, “Kidowed.”

Then again, Ronald J. Knapp wrote in “Beyond Endurance” that, “It was discovered that all parents eventually develop a primary and fundamental need to talk about this tragic experience and about what they can remember about their child. They develop an intense desire or need to reveal their sadness, to release their anger, to allay their guilt, and to have others understand their reactions. This is not only how they remember; it is also how they confront the reality of what has happened to them.”

Judith Bernstein says, about conducting a study of 50 bereaved parents that, “I came away with profound admiration for the courage of ordinary people who never presumed to be courageous at all.”

Everybody’s bitchy now. Now there’s another new woman here. She looks to be in her 50’s and got in trouble for “boosting” electronics in Buffalo and a bad check in Potter County in 2004. I feel kind of bad for her. But not really because she only got 60 days. Some people have all the luck. Tori is passing around a note that says that she looks like a Cho-Mo version of Peter Griffin. Mean.

“When a child dies, the very ground on which we depend for stability heaves and quakes and the rightness and orderliness of our existence are destroyed. The loss of a child is shattering, unique among losses.”

One of the parents, Pauline, that was interviewed after losing a child wrote, “…I was angry at all of them [family], for something. I felt that they needed me, and I was annoyed that they needed me. I didn’t have anything to give; I was vacant; I was empty. I wasn’t sure that I was going to live.

8:30pm

I forgot to make my 12:40pm phone call, so I called my parent’s house and my mother answered. 

I said, “Any news?”

“No.”

“Are the boys in bed?”

“Yes.”

“What did they do today?”

“They were happy to stay home all day and they picked berries and played good and didn’t fight at all.”

“Um, okay…Bye.”

“Bye.”

Fucking Witch from Hell. She could at least try. God. 

The new lady seems to like it here. Of course, anything’s better than jail. They forget that after a while and then the bitching starts. I didn’t get to go to the meeting tonight, which sucks. There’s so many people here now that they have to pick and choose who can go because their stupid van only seats seven. Chantilly is making door signs. She’s very artsy. I forgot to give Tiger the bracelet I made her. I hope Dubya lets her come every week, but I know he won’t, so I’m filing a Modification of Custody motion tomorrow when I go get my bloodwork.