Feeling like there's no one to talk to...

My wife and brother-in-law both post to a blog as a means of self-therapy so I figure I'll give it a try too..I do not expect anyone to ever read these but maybe just writing things out will help me. The last 5 months have been the most stressful and emotionally difficult of my life and I really think I need to find an outlet. There are 3 people that I would feel comfortable talking with about all this; my wife Anna and brother-in-law are two of them and it's difficult enough for them to be going through all of this too so I don't feel like I can dump on them. The other is my sister Hope and having a two-way conversation with her now is pretty difficult.

Today marked the 16th week since Hope passed away following her fourth battle with cancer. She was barely 36! For her, my brother-in-law Jake and I'm sure many others in her hometown the last 6-8 months of her life were very difficult. She was not in very good shape, both physically and mentally due to her repeated battle with cancer. However for me, living 625+ miles away in NC it was very difficult to experience, so getting told at Thanksgiving that she was going to die in a matter of weeks was very shocking and difficult to deal with. I was not able to see her ups and downs over all those months and to process things like Jake and my mother did. I hope that that is one of the factors in Jake's ability to deal with everything and to be able to move on with life (he is now a single dad of two great young boys). For me, I still feel like I'm playing catch-up on the emotions. I still think of Hope everyday and at times feel like in doing so I'm obsessing over her. I also have a very strong urge to talk with Jake everyday, thankfully we are both so busy that I actually rarely get the time. I'm afraid that if I did talk to him every day that I would start to annoy him so I guess it's a good thing I don't.

I guess the reason I feel the need to talk with him so much is that I look at him and the boys as the only way for me to maintain some form of contact with Hope's memory. She was the only person in my family that I was close with and not having her around anymore is a lot harder to deal with then I ever expected. To me she was more then just an older sibling, she was a friend. Growing up she was the one person I always looked up to, the one that taught me how to ride a bike in the first grade, the one that always had my back when my older brother felt the need to show us "who was boss", the one that made sure her friends didn't shut the door on me whenever they all hung out at our house, the one that made her high school boyfriend drive me to school too whenever he picked her up (BTW - Jake was that boyfriend).

I'm sure that all of this is fairly normal stuff to feel and to deal with and I really hope that as time goes on all these emotions with stop taking over so much of my life. I often find myself reacting to things differently then I normally would and hope that it doesn't upset Anna too much. She has said a couple of times that I seem happy (I'm not, but it's not due to any fault of hers so I never say anything) so maybe my behavior isn't stressing her out any more than she normally gets. I almost hate to say this but of all my family members that this could have happened to I wish it had been someone else. Losing Hope had been like losing the only real family that I had. I know my parent's love me (having two kids of my own has proven that a parent's love is unconditional) but neither one of them was as huge a part of my life as my sister.

Well since this is just my first big, meaningful post I'm going to stop here. I know that I have plenty of other posts to delve into everything further and there's no need to try and do it all in one post. To anyone that ever comes across this or any of my future post, feel free to comment but please do so anonymously. I'm not sure how I'd feel knowing exactly who is reading any of this, I'm simply doing this as a way of "talking" things out without having to find a friend to listen who can truly understand how I feel.

I miss you terribly Hope, more then I expected too! Keep a watchful eye on your three Wise men and I will do my best to watch over them also.