Coping With Tragedy

I’m usually the Mr. Spock of the emotional world, able to self-surgery my own guts and analyze them dispassionately.  Even when I’m unable to control my desires, I at least have a pretty good sense of why I’m doing something.
That awareness is the the first thing to go in times of serious grief.
I first noticed it when my beloved Uncle Tommy died, my first major death, and I spent the next few weeks getting upset for no apparent reason.  Well, the reasons were kind of apparent, but I was breaking down over empty toothpaste tubes and the like.
And then, when my friend Kat was in the hospital and we were all worried she had cancer, I thought I was a monster because I was never thinking about Kat but I was in a serious, self-hatred funk of depression.  How could I be so selfish?  Then I got the news that her tumor was benign, and literally my depression evaporated in the next minute.
When I’m in serious stew, I can’t think about it up-front, so all my processing comes on the sidelines.  I haven’t thought about my grandmother, or my cousin Jimmy, as much as I’d like to have.  To my mind, I should be paying them respect by having them on the brain 24/7, like some sort of CNN newscrawl.  But what’s happening is that I’m reclusive and brittle, taking deep and angry offense at the slightest of bruises.  Once again, my anger is squirting out through other sources.
And I’m usually good at having a network of happy text-correspondences going throughout the week, but I forget these days; I think I’ve responded, or I read it and it bounces off, and so I’m sort of mean and isolated, which I don’t like much, either.
And I know.  I know it’s all okay, people love me, I’m under a heavy load, et al.  But it’s not how I like to be, and I don’t like the way I’m acting right now.  But it’s the way my brain has formed to bleed off massive amounts of emotional trauma, and I guess it’s what I do.  I keep functioning, which is good.
Still.  I saw little Rebecca via Facetime the other day, and it did me a world of good.  Baby steps.  Baby, baby steps.