Looking for Support

[eowyn58]

Hi.

At 3:57 PM on December 14, 2010, life as I had known it stopped.  That's when Bob, my gifted, demanding, generous and complicated partner of eight years drew his last breath.  He died after a month long struggle with severe Pancreatitis.

He died without a will and had only one real asset - a Harley-Davidson that was basically taken to repay funeral expenses.  The man who paid for most of the simple arrangments - he was Bob's bodyguard when Bob was president of a motorcycle club 20 years ago - stood in the church and told the congregation that he had paid for the funeral.  He also told numerous people at the luncheon following the funeral that he had paid the expenses.  Then he turned around two months later and told me that he expected me to pay him back.  So after weeks of deliberation and tired of harrassment & veiled threats, I relinquished my intent to try to obtain the title to the bike and  the Harley - more than a machine to me - was taken on April 24, 2010.

On March 18, 2010 I was laid off with 33 others from my job of six years.  The household income, already reduced by more than 50% when Bob died, was then cut an additional 50%.  My unemeployment did not kick in for nearly 2 months ad I was forced to sell nearly all of Bob's possessions - he was a master mechanic and had a fully equipped motorcycle shop - just to meet the high utility bills and my rent.

If my wonderful landlady had not reduced my rent in half for 6 months, I don't know what I would have done.  But the 6 months passed and although I was current with my rent, my landlady gave me a deadline of 7/1/10 to vacate.  I was lucky enough to find a lovely 2 bedroom apartment in a Victorian home in a good location two weeks before 7/1/10.   I was lucky too to sell what was left of Bob's things, a 2nd vehicle and a lawn tractor to get the money together to move on 6/26/10.

So, in six months I lost my companion, my job and my home of 7 years.  I also lost a few people who I considered good friends which was another tough pill to swallow as I cannot fathom anything that I did to cause them to disappear from my life.  I credit my parents with passing on their strength and Bob with teaching me to get up, stand up and get on with getting on.  To say that I am exhausted, depressed, lonely and often feel lost in this world is an understatement.  One of the few positives that has occurred is that I lost about 60 pounds since mid-November, 2010 - I stopped eating when Bob got sick. 

Moving has not stopped my emotional rollercoaster.  Somehow I was naive enough to think it would.  I am also dilligently seeking employment, but in the state that I live, the unemployment rate is high and my hope of finding employment that will adequately support my needs is not high.  The stress of this is unbelievable.

One major emotional step forward has occurred since I moved - the lessening of the terrible rage I felt towards Bob for leaving me without a will and not loving me enough to legally protect me against the vultures.  But my financial worries, depression and loneliness continue.  It's true that grief changes - I have begun to accept certain realities and have begun to have moments - I mean moments - when I feel that I might just get through this alive.  I get up every morning and do what I need to do, but there's little to no happiness or satisfaction in any achievement these days.  I don't know who I am anymore.

I'm lucky to have a small but sincere circle of support in my sisters and a few friends, but like so many other people, none of them has experienced complete devastation of their lives.  I guess I'm just looking for any emotional guidance anyone can give amd to share with others what I have learned about loss thus far.

Thanks.

 

[Kelly]

Dear Members,

We are excited to mention that we are moving to a more new and improved message boards on MONDAY MORNING AUGUST 9th! The boards will be done for a few hours while we are making the conversation. Remember we posted information about this move a month ago. For some of you this might seem a bit sudden,  but when we were reviewing the site we determined the current message board you are using is out of date and the company that designed it is no longer in existence. The good news is this new message board will have new features that have been requested in the past like more fields we can add to your profiles and a chat room up to 20 people at one time. If we find the chat room is bursting at the seams we will add additional room for extra people. All your old posts, private messages and such will be migrated to the new message board. You might have to put up your profile picture again but not sure. The new company will be doing the migration for us. Here is a short list of some of the new features on the board:

- Custom Profile Fields- Users can customize their profile pages by selecting a background color or background image, with tiling options.- Facebook and Twitter Integration- users can respond to multiple posts at once with "mini-quote"- Pinned discussion threads - like welcome to our board etc.- Announcements made across some boards or the entire message board- Search: Users can easily find all content generated by a particular member, by clicking the 'Find Content' button that appears on the main profile page, or in the Mini Profile Popup which can be accessed throughout the board. The results page allows content to be filtered by application, as well whether the member created it or merely participated in it. - Privacy: allows users to sign in anonymously, hiding them from the online users list. Users also have the option to disable personal conversations and user-to-user emails, as well as ignore other users if necessary.

The next exciting piece of news about the new message board is it will have a new domain name of www.grieving.com for search engine optimization purposes. It will still be apart of Beyond Indigo and can be found through www.beyondindigo.com. We will be redirecting your current URL's to this new domain name but we might miss a few. If that is the case simply go back to www.grieving.com or www.beyondindigo.com to find your message board thread. We will try to make the transition as seamless as possible. 

The bottom line is the new board will give us room to grow our community and more options to interact better with each other. 

If you have any questions please direct them to feedback@beyondindigo.com.

Kelly Baltzell, MA

CEO/President

Beyond Indigo Family