The Fever Has Broken

CW: there is a mention of loss of loved ones, which is integral to the story.

The titular metaphorical (or, perhaps, emotional) fever has broken. This time of year, really from mid-March up until now, is something of a void portal for me, and I think that concept is something that is important to talk about in a realistic and hopefully ultimately positive and grounded way.

For the backstory, my wife (we’d known each other 17 years and been married 12 of those) passed away three years ago this past April. On top of that, and almost a decade ago now, my mother passed away in early July.

The void begins to open in mid-March; that peculiar creeping sensation like liquid metal in some sci-fi horror movie, drawing all the heat and life out of my body as it climbs up from the pit of my stomach until it swallows me whole. She went into hospital at the end of March. The first two weeks of April are sickled o’er with the pale cast of green, to misquote The Bard, in the way that seasickness is depicted in old cartoons. The face a meter, slowly flooding green until the inevitable happens.

My consciousness loses all hope. I can’t sleep unless I’m exhausted, I have trouble remembering words, my sentences falter and trail off. I can’t commit to the idea of caring, much less actually care about anything. My hobbies become annoyances, my breathing a chore, my exercise a hope that I burn myself to the ground. My laundry an act of defiance, because look, I can still be a functional human, ha ha.

I drive to work reflexively, a benefit of working for the same company at the same location for 14 years. I operate on instinct through my days, not so much trusting my gut as being mentally and emotionally incapable of thinking things through. It’s not intuition, it’s lizard brain survival mode for the modern world. A lifetime of almost 30 years working in the same industry, an age of being with myself in the darkness and finding my way out without a lantern.

April becomes May, my mother’s birthday was in the middle of the month. May becomes June, my wife and I shared the same birthday, believe it or not. And then suddenly, it is July, and the fever breaks on the day of mum’s passing. I wake up and my brain isn’t wrapped up in cotton wool and plastic, I don’t have to hold my breath to stop from crying, I feel the shape of the seat of the car when I sit down. I remember driving to work this morning. I can think, and reason with those ideas.

I don’t choose any of the above, it’s just something that happens now. And on this, the third year of experiencing it, I’ve realized that resisting only makes it worse. So-called “bad” emotions aren’t dangerous, the idea that they’re bad is the dangerous part. I sat with the feelings this time around, letting them pass over me and through me. I didn’t just stare into the void: I stepped in one end and out the other. It’s true, the formless, endless void does have an entry and an exit point. Maybe not the expanse of the void itself, but our brushes with it. Where we pass through it and it passes through us, if we succumb to it, if we turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the void has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain, to finish borrowing from Frank Herbert.

I’m not trying to glorify any of this. I’m merely saying that sometimes things are awful and that’s okay. I don’t think we’re supposed to be joyful all the time. I also understand that some emotional pains feel like death. The truly heart-stabbing losses, the biggest unraveling, the little empty moments of lost companionship. They all hurt. They all lead us to dark places. If you ever forced yourself to go into the basement in the dark as child to prove to yourself that the scary monsters didn’t exist, then you’ll know that the fear is real, and the fear itself will kill you before the imaginary monster can. And if you’re reading this, you’ll also know that dying to that heart-pumping, cold-sweating, feel-to-scream fear doesn’t actually kill you, even though it feels like it in the moment.

What dies, if you let it, is the fear itself. What dies in the void is the void itself. Maybe not the vast, formless void in totality, but our access to the part that pulled us in to begin with. Voidscapes die in the voidscape. When we die in the void there is nothing. When we emerge from that void-death there is nothing. And within that nothing is everything.

 
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