Posted 1/5/2015 8:48 PM (GMT -5)
Ok, I decided I would so something about my biggest problems, and this is it.
I had already started feeling depressed because of various issues, like the omnipresent difficulties with my sister.
I logged onto FB, which reminded me that it was my cousin Mark's birthday. When I went to his site, there were all these posts saying "Happy Birthday in heaven." (I have a very Christian family on my father's side). First, I thought it was some kind of weird joke. I scrolled down, and found out he died suddenly last October, of undiagnosed colon cancer. Actually, he was my second cousin, but I once spent a summer with him, and we frequently talked by phone. He had faithfully kept in touch with me over the years.
He had 7 brothers and sisters, and my guess is that they had a time trying to notify so many people so fast, so somehow, I wasn't notified.
The crux of the whole matter though is that he called me twice in the months leading up to his death, and I didn't return his calls! He was schizophrenic, but he took his meds, lived on his own, and had it fairly well under control. I had a hard time talking to him on the phone though, bc his speech was slurred, and he tended to skip around from topic to topic, and I had a tough time following.
I preferred emailing, but he much preferred talking by phone. He had planned to fly out to the east coast with a friend of his to visit his brother, and possibly me, ultimately on the way to DC to attend a NAMI conference (National Alliance for the Mentally Ill).
He left a message on my phone in August, asking me to call him back, and I didn't. And for awhile, I blocked this from my memory, but I realized he had called another time (before or after?) saying that he and his friend weren't going to be coming because he was sick.
Not too long ago, my answering machine was full, and I went through all my messages, and I think I may have called him back when I was deleting my messages and got to that one, and his phone had been disconnected. But it would probably have been a good while after he called. Apparently he knew something bad was going on, and he had been feeling sick about three months before his death.
I guess I feel that I was maybe blowing him off in a manner similar to what others do to us, and he was probably sad, bc I know how much he cared about me. He had a large family, but he always said that I was his favorite cousin.
I am devastated, can't sleep, am really tired, and can't get to the bottom of this dilemma. It's like there's a bottomless hole in me.
I was kind of already giving up on a lot of stuff (doctors, housecleaning, taking the garbage, etc.). I went back and looked at our emails, and realized that I had given him these stupid excuses for not returning other calls he had made, though I had asked him to please come see me when he traveled to the East coast.
I feel like a total sh--, and I think he probably felt pretty rejected by me. I am quite devastated, not to mention unable to sleep, and unable to get up in the morning due to intense fatigue.
I contacted the friend with whom he was going to be traveling, and she messaged me back, but I'm trying to figure out what to say to her. She is mentally ill as well, and I'm not sure how to implicate myself in all this.
I very, very rarely feel like this, but right now I do feel like a failure, and that I'm failing in many aspects of my life.
Sorry,
M