A eulogy I wished I hadn’t had to write.

Firstly I want to send my sincerest of condolences to Roberta, Mike, Lori and the rest of Kevin’s family, and his extended family of friends who reach far and wide.

Kevin,

I don’t want to have to write this. Because I am in absolute denial of your departure. I don’t think that a soul as tender and kind as yours would be allowed to leave this earth so soon.

You are missed. You are loved.

Just as everyone in this room knows you uniquely, I do too. In the last few years we only spoke very sparingly, because I became something else. The distance between us felt so far but I knew you, I really KNEW you. The part of you that was quiet and reserved. I was the loudest person in the room, and you were the quietest. You showed me what love was, when I felt like I would never be worthy of it. You introduced me to music that made me start to feel human again. You supported me. You loved me just as I loved you. I was so broken, but with you I felt almost fixed.

I remember when I started staying with you at your mom’s house, and you would sneak me in late at night after you got off work. I had burned all my bridges and had nowhere to go and you took me in. You saw something in me, when I couldn’t.

You didn’t want your mom to know that you has a girl permanently camped out in your bedroom. I felt like a broken bird that you had rescued and you were waiting for the right time to tell your mom that you had brought me home with you. It took time, but I was accepted into your home, and I finally felt a sense of belonging.

I remember that you had the biggest bedroom out of the three bedrooms in the townhouse, and I just knew how special you were because your mom let you have the biggest room. 

That blue room that made me feel like we were deep in the ocean, where nobody could find us.

I remember how deep you used to sleep. I would get so angry when I would come to bed later than you, because you would always just appear to have fallen on the bed, and you would be laying diagonally. I would wedge myself between the wall and your body, trying to move you. It was impossible because you were like a brick. 

And now, I don’t think you are gone. I just think that maybe you are just in one of your deep sleeps.

Kevin, you are loved, missed and will always be remembered.

It shouldn’t have been him.

I went and got a haircut. I came home and put on a face. My insides don’t match my outsides. 

I’m sitting at my kitchen table and I’m scrolling like I’m trying to find a seed of courage in my phone. I feel like something has been lost inside of me and I can’t quite grasp what it is. I feel full and I feel empty. 

I feel – that’s just it.

When I was doing my makeup I kept having this thing that has been called dissassociating but it felt different this time. Like it lasted minutes instead of seconds.

I had to look away from the mirror because I kept feeling like the person I was seeing was different. That somehow the person I was feeling like I had become, was something else. That the thoughts inside my head, had finally found themselves in a body that I did not recognize – but that I really had because I had been watching this person’s life from afar.

This feels strange today. Is this how I grieve? Am I constantly in grief over the life I left behind, the people who have died, and the person I used to be?

Who am I right now, if it’s not the person that I am seeing in the mirror? 

I am changing so fast that I don’t feel like I have enough time to keep up to myself. My hopefully final proofs of my book are in Richmond right now and they have cleared customs. Monday night I will have them by the latest. This is huge. But I keep wanting to pull back because I don’t know if people will really actually think it’s worth reading. I mean, I was 18 years old when I started writing it, and I talk like a child. I acted like a child because deep down I was.

That voice that starts off in the beginning is so naive. But it changes, just as I changed. And my voice becomes something else – as I become someone else in entirety. 

I hope it’s readable. Because I want people to know what it was like for me. That my life wasn’t so horrible that I decided to start doing meth. It’s that when I tried it for the first time, in a recreational fashion – I was instantly done. 

I sometimes laugh at the small amount that I speak of through the book. That it only took half a point to keep me awake and content for about 24 hours. Because I was a child even though I was not a child’s age. I almost wanted to remove the parts where I talked about my consumption amount because I didn’t want people to think I was an idiot for thinking a point was a large amount of drugs – because it was to me. 

Everything was so different.

I am trying to distract myself by thinking about things that are not about tomorrow. Because tomorrow we will all gather to pay our respects to Kevin’s family and his friends, and it’s making me feel sick. 

I can’t believe it was him. It shouldn’t have been him. 

The darkness.

Nobody wants to hear about the dark days. Nobody wants to talk about it. People want to brush these things under the rug. Don’t talk about it because it’s too depressing. People will worry.

Well I am going to talk about it. Because this darkness is taking me down with it. I can’t watch tv, because it doesn’t interest me. This is the laziest thing I can do right now and I can’t even. I’m sitting on my bedroom floor in front of my daylight lamp. I’m trying to brighten whatever is happening inside of me. It’s so dark in here.

I mean in my mind. I have so much stuff I should be doing for school, and yet here I am feeling paralyzed. I’m not just feeling paralyzed it’s actually as though I really am.

It’s so fucking dark in here and I am at such a low that it feels like I will never see the light. But nobody wants to hear about that, because it’s depressing. Because it’s something that we always push under the rug.

Put the darkness in the closet, it will go away at some point. 

We hope.

Nap.

It’s not even 6 pm and I’m laying in bed. I had a really good day today. Only one class and in that class I recieved my first 100% mark on an assignment worth 15% of my grade. It felt amazing.

I also got an email notification saying my proofs for my book are on their way to me. This is huge. Beyond anything that I could have ever imagined happening in my world.

My life is so good, yet I am stuck laying here in bed – not because I had an exhausting day – but because I just don’t have it in me to get back up.

The way I am holding my phone, and cranking my neck is ridiculous. I should be running a bath and going through my Quizlet app and preparing for my finals. But I’m stuck here.

I am just stuck here and I don’t want to move. Netflix doesn’t seem appealing. Facebook is the same as it was 20 minutes ago. Instagram same. Every other social media outlet that I check everyday for updates from various people – are all unchanged today. Everything is the same.

Except me, I am changing – but something doesn’t seem right inside of me. I don’t feel well. I don’t feel right.

I am doing so well, why do I not feel like it right now?

I am going to take a nap. I don’t know what to do with myself here.

Feet on the floor.

Some days I feel so out of control. I was in bed by around 7, I think last night. I just couldn’t stay up. I also couldn’t stop eating. I woke up a few times through the night, and each time I ate a small yogurt. I could not stop myself. It felt like medicine going down my strained throat.

I woke up to a phone call from my boyfriend this morning before 9am. Just to tell me he loved me. I fed the cat. I thought about having my shake but I stopped myself. I felt full. But I did not put on my water for my tea, I set my alarm on my phone for noon and I went back to bed.

Because there is something inside of me that wants me to stay in bed. I don’t want to stay in bed, but I just feel like the sound of silence is too much right now.

He called again at 11, to tell me he loved me again. He never calls this much, but maybe he knows that something dark is inside of me right now. He must know that I’m just feeling a whole lot of mixed emotions about life.

I am great at living in denial, and as far as I am concerned Kevin did not die two weeks ago. Everyone is just saying that because he went somewhere to sort his life out. He went to a better place than here.

I hope his friends can see that he was suffering. Through all his wildness and drunken fun – there was a small boy inside of him who would do anything for anyone so that he could try to mend the way he felt inside. If he could have directed half of that love inward, he could have built a beautiful life for himself.

I feel so powerless. I feel like one small person who can have no impact in this huge world. It makes me want to stay in bed for as long as I can today, because I don’t want to be in a place where I don’t feel like I can help.

I have decided to try to do something, for this culture. When I attended Electric Love Festival last year, I spent only the day there. It was actually the last time I saw Kevin, and when I saw him my heart fell to the ground below me. He was all alone, wandering around – looking completely deflated. I said hi, he said hi. He didn’t look well.

When we saw each other back at the campsite I was making hot dogs for lunch and I asked if he wanted one. It felt like a reverse of old times because he always used to bring home food from work for me. He always fed me, and now I was feeding him.

Once it became nighttime it was all too much for me, because when I’m around partying like that all I can think of is that I could really use a meeting. So I spoke to my brother afterwards and I told him that’s what was missing. It needed meetings and a sober camp.

My brother told me that I should coordinate it. I said maybe, because I thought it would be too much work. He asked me a few times if I had decided whether to do it or not and I told him that I needed to talk to some of my people and then get back to him.

After we lost Kevin, I made the decision to get back to my brother. I told him that it was a go. I would coordinate the sober camp at Electric Love Festival, and we would do four meetings a day. Two of each fellowship. I got in contact with two of my girlfriends and we have been working on a plan. The wheels are in motion. I hope it’s enough to plant a seed of hope. I know that I can’t change the world, but if I can plant a single seed – I will feel like there is a purpose for me.

My boyfriend just called – again. He must just know that I’m feeling so broken inside. Though maybe now I can have the courage to get out of bed.
Feet on the floor.

Now I’m out the door.

Straining.

I was so hopeful that my doctor had finally solved my throat clearing problem. Until today… 

It’s been a perfectly fine day, other than the fact I couldn’t not stop clearing my throat – all day. It is strained. I feel exhausted from trying to stop myself from doing it.

The medication was working. And now it’s not. I feel like I am right back to where I started and I feel like I might be loosing my mind.

I am so tired. The drive home from school reminded me how powerful the darkness and the rain can be. I feel it consuming me. Like it could just pull me down and hold me to the ground until the sun comes out again.

I am not scared of driving in the rain like I used to be. I am learning to be able to handle zero visibility. I don’t panic much anymore when I’m driving next to a big semi truck and can’t see a thing because my wipers can’t clear the rain fast enough. It’s not that anymore…

It’s just something I will never get used to, and it’s how dark the darkness truly feels this time of year. It’s trying to pull me down. It’s trying to pull me in.

I am home from school now and laying down in bed, because something inside me is wanting to say ok to the darkness. Like there is something so familiar about it.

This whole dissassociative state keeps happening, and it’s almost everytime that I am talking to someone for more than just a hi and hello. I don’t understand what’s happening to me.

I feel like every part of me is straining. My voice, my eyes, my skin, my feelings about what I am seeing and feeling from behind my eyes. 

Everything is straining.

Chronic laryngitis.

Went and saw my family doctor again this morning, because I can’t live like this. This throat clearing is causing me such distress. It feels like the worst thing that my body has ever been stuck with. 

It comes in goes in waves, and just when I feel like I finally have something that might resemble control over it, WHAM. It comes back full force.

So as I was waiting in the patient room for him to come in, I could hear him tapping away in the room across the hall. My throat decided that just as I had entered the doctor’s office 15 minutes prior that it was time for an episode. This continued as I was waiting for him. When he came into the room the first thing he mentioned was that something was happening to me for the last 5 minutes straight. 

YES. SOMETHING IS HAPPENING TO ME. I am so glad he heard it that time, because during my last visit I wasn’t having an episode and so he didn’t get to see it first hand.

So the outcome today was that I have chronic laryngitis caused by GERD, and so that’s what he is treating me for now. So I will take this medication for the next 30 days and I will pray that it is what is actually happening to me – because it’s driving me mad.

It started as throat clearing and now it’s become my coping mechanism for almost everything. It’s my go-to and I don’t want to go-to it anymore.

I am sitting in the cafeteria at school right now and I can’t stop clearing my throat. I feel so crazy, but I know there is something sitting there just below my throat. It’s like almost in my chest and if I just try hard enough I might be able to get it out. So an clearly my throat approximately every 7 seconds right now, and this is absolute madness.

I hope that it’s just chronic laryngitis.

Spilling.

My hands are trying to be neatly folded in my lap, but there is a phone stuck in between them. I have an hour before my next class and I should be working on my next major paper, but I couldn’t find a seat downstairs to work at a table with my laptop. I take up space everywhere I go. I take up so much space because there is so much of me spilling out into the world around me.

So here I sit with one leg tucked under the other. This seat is not big enough for all my spilling over. It’s just not enough for all that I am, but I will manage.

I ate too much for lunch, because that’s what I am good at. I consume. I have no off switch.

I still can’t get a grip on clearing my throat but I have never felt as at rest in my life as I do now. I think maybe the doubling of my nighttime medication as per my doctor’s orders has actually really helped me – but not in the way I expected it to.

I feel a strangeness coming over me and everything is so new. Nothing is as it was before and I wonder if this is just my experience or has this happened to anyone else before. I know that I am not unique in my addiction and alcoholism – but I feel unique in my recovery.

I feel like something is happening inside my body and I have no idea how to receive it or approach it. It’s like I’m seeing with new eyes. Like actually seeing things for the very first time. Everything is different now. 

So why do I continue thinking that I am only what my past is. Why can’t I just break free from her. She is the addiction that I couldn’t quite shake. She is the darkness that wanted me dead. She will only ever be an addict. She will never change. I say goodbye but it feels like I am her and she is me. I don’t know how to introduce myself without introducing her at the same time.

She feels like my ex-girlfriend who I just can’t stop talking about. Like I’m on a first date – over and over again – and she’s the only thing that I am built of. 

I feel like more than half of me that spills out all around me – is her contents. She’s gone and yet she still finds her way into taking up so much of my space around me.

Just spilling everywhere I go.

Polar opposites.

I am sitting on campus waiting for my next class to start. I have almost an hour and a half to go still after waiting here for an hour already. Today is not a good day for not clearing my throat. I feel like I am going crazy. The strain is driving me nuts. I don’t think I am stressed. I am just tired.

I’m just so tired.

Only 2 more weeks left of school, and then it’s finals week. I am excited to get this semester over and done with because I need to finish working on my epilogue. I need to publish my book during this Christmas break. I need to release it, and when I say release it I mean I need to not have it sitting there waiting for me to tend to it. To finish showing it all the love and all the respect it deserves. I need it to be outside of me.

I want to be able to put it on my book shelf at home. I want to look at it, really look at it. I want to be able to say that was then. I want to be able to look at my body and say this is now. There are many different times in my life, that are nothing like the rest. I feel like once I publish the book, I will be able to stop thinking in circles.

All of my thoughts are so extreme. From one to the next. In class today I couldn’t believe the things I was learning. It made me angry to be a Canadian. Then it occured to me that the injustice we were talking about happens everywhere. There is so much wrong with this world and when I stop and think about it, I feel like it’s really too much. That the pain is too much. That the darkness wants to eat me alive. It’s so dark outside. Then I think about the recent loss, and how much loss others have had to experience. Yet they stay the same. They stay the same, and I have no idea why. I mean – I know what addiction is like. But what else needs to happen to these people for them to want to change their own lives? Change starts by making the decision to try.

And because I am not drunk or high, I am able to step back. To take that one extreme and go to the opposite end. To know that my purpose in life is to try to right the wrongs. For my life to matter, I need to be able to show other people that they matter. If I can’t be a part of the change in this world, I don’t want to have anything to do with it at all. I can’t stand by and watch this world burn to the ground because that’s exactly how I see it through my eyes. Everything either hurts, or it feels really good. Like polar opposites.

I am like polar opposites.

And today I am so tired.

 

 

 

I can fucking do this.

Hey. Guess what?

I am doing this. I am continuing to do exactly what I was doing before all this sadness took over. I am going to continue to fight for my right to live a good life. 

I earned every single seat that I have ever sat in, in my entire life. The seat I currently occupy is the only seat I have ever wanted to be in. I am literally in the driver seat of all the goals and aspirations that I could ever have imagined. 

I have had no desire to drink, since I quit. But these past few days have been texting me. They were testing me because when I asked how I was supposed to stay sober through this, I didn’t mean that I was going to drink. I meant that I actually needed advice on how people deal with real, present, current and strong grief. The kind that I have never had happen to me – ever – sober.

I have been not so much dealing with my grief from my past, because it’s not the time yet. Even my counsellor has told me that we need to work on my coping strategies before we even bring that box down.

But when an unwrapped box of grief fell at my feet, I had no idea what to do with it. 

So I cried. I posted angry stuff. I grieved. And now I have to put my school game face back on – because that’s the only way that I will be able to battle these demons. 

The only way that I will be able to do anything useful to help with this culture – this culture that is literally killing our friends – is to continue in school. To become a social worker.

I need to continue, not so that I can reverse time – but so that I can help create change for the future. I need to stay sober. I need to stay focused. I need to keep my head held high, because I am in charge of my own decisions. I decide what my next step is going to be. 

I am lucky to have made it out alive. I am even more lucky that I have been given the opportunity to go to University. The universe is on my side. I can do this.

I can fucking do this.