The fine line between Nothing and Crazy

If you asked me how I've been doing lately, I've decided what I will tell you. I'll tell you what I've been doing. I could tell you how I've been doing, but that would take much longer. Longer than most people are looking for. So I'll tell you:

1. The first week after Marshall died, I started learning how to live again without him.
2. The second week, I planned his memorial and put together his scrapbook.
3. The third week, I started remodeling the upstairs bathroom. By myself. It's looking pretty good.

I found that there is a fine line between nothing and crazy, after you lose a child. There are many mornings when I wake up and cannot make myself get out of bed for a good thirty minutes. I feel nothing. I think so many things, like "Brittany, go get your butt in the shower. Get dressed. Get coffee. Do something. Anything." But I can't do it. I just lay there like a limp noodle until finally I start scaring myself with my nonchalance and start moving. Then, the key is to keep moving. Because once you stop- once you pause in the shower, or sit down on the couch, the nothing starts again. And then you have to worry about the one thing worse than nothing. Feeling everything- all of the pain and grief and lost hopes- they threaten to come flooding in if the nothing sticks around long enough.

So to combat the nothing, I discovered crazy. At least, what most people would consider crazy. Like consuming nothing all day but two cups of coffee until your husband comes home and you realize you really need to eat. But you didn't feel like eating prior to that anyway, because you were putting together your son's memorial program and deciding whether or not to bury him, and what cemetery, or should you keep the ashes at the house for a while? Like standing up for 10 hours straight at the kitchen counter working on his scrapbook without any breaks so that it would be done in time for the service. Because it had to be perfect. Because you know you'll never get to plan anything for him again. No birthdays, no Christmases, no Halloween costumes. So you put everything into those colorful pages, which seems crazy. To post pictures in a book of you smiling and pregnant, when you feel your heart physically breaking inside your chest. Like picking paint colors based on their name because you know somehow, it will make you feel closer to him. Drinking 6 glasses of wine in the hopes that it will make your mind turn off, just for a while. But it doesn't. Crazy.

I'm either running crazy 100 miles an hour, or sitting and drowning in a sense of complete hopelessness. But I guess, maybe crazy at this point in life is actually normal for recovery. Or at least I hope it is. Because it's the only way I know how. I just have to remember to pray, in the middle of all the crazy, because I know God is the only one who can save me.