The Loss of Oneself

Morning are typically hard for me  I find it takes me some time to get my wits about me, to get both eyes open at the same time.  Today is no exception.  As I sit here propped up in bed, my back resting against Larry's pillow I am faced with the reality of what my life will be like now that Larry is gone.  Larry and I had rituals in the morning.  We had rituals about many things.  How we woke up, how we said good morning, how we navigated our day together.  How we ended them.  Bedtime was of particular importance.  Me spooning with him on the floor, then him moving onto the sofa curling up, waiting.  Of me saying "time for bed" as I turned the lights out.  Of me picking him up and carrying him into the bedroom.  And once we were settled in bed, of me saying "lights out".  He had many things he did afterwards too.  Climbing under the covers for a while, then going to eat, followed by climbing onto the bedding box to stare out at the garden, eventually coming back to bed with me.  Even within his dementia he remembered.  Looking around I can see all of his favorite spots, the nest at the end of the bed, the perch in the closet that looked out on the garden.  That was his sister Sylvia's spot before it was his.  What I called the Sauna, the triangular space behind one of the bedroom doors that backed up against the wall where the heat pipe was behind, next to the radiator for the bedroom.  Larry had a particular fondness for the feel of cotton sheets.  He loved to sleep next to me on or against the pillow.  I suppose remembering is my way of diverting my attention from the obvious on this first morning without my boy;  how one navigates the pain of losing ones child.  Of how one defines oneself in the face of intense loss and with the prospect of becoming "Other".   In the old days it seemed defining ourselves was more straightforward.  People chose their marriage or profession as their title.  Mr. and Mrs. X, Doctor and Mrs. Y.   In Italy doctors are afforded the title Il Docttore when being addressed, both in and out of work.  People do it out of respect and to honor their accomplishments.  We have done the same for priests, college professors, and lawyers just naming a few.  Times have changed though.  These days we seemed to have come to the understand that the search for our authenticity is how we define ourselves, especially in the midst of loss.  Or it seems to be that to me within the microcosms of my life as I know it.  Even within the realms of gender we have come to understand that the traditional monikers of male and female no longer apply for some.  That gender fluidity is just that, the vast area that exists between the polar opposites of male and female.
Sitting here in bed, I wonder what my life will now be, how I will define myself as I face the abyss that exists in front of me. 
How does one take in the vastness of losing their existence as one knows it, of losing the sun that both fed and sustained.  Larry was quite literally the center of my life of which all else revolved. He was the core to which all else was ordered.  I may be sounding melodramatic, but I'm not.  There is a very real history to all of this.  It was Larry and his sister Sylvia who fed and sustained me through the darkest days of my early recovery nearly seventeen years ago.  Days during which I thought at any moment I would quite literally die.  It was the touch of their bodies against mine, the sound of their purr, the life I saw in their eyes that provided for me the only link to sanity and the real world I had.  When Sylvia died suddenly eleven years ago it became Larry and I; me trying to support him in his incomprehensible pain of losing the world as he had always known since birth and me of losing her and the understanding of what "Us" had been.  Before her death Sylvia had been the center of our existence.  She was core by which all else was ordered.  Her indomitable spirit, her ability to love and be loved so unconditionally was what had fed and sustained us all; and by the grace of the Universe Larry somehow survived the loss of that and his sister, as I of mine and her.  In the intervening years I adopted Crook and we forged a new definition of "Us" as Larry came out of his shell taking on Sylvia's indomitable spirit and ability to love so freely and completely.  Then three years ago we lost Crook and the unique unfailing love that he had brought into our family.  That is what I am again facing as I sit here, the loss of that indomitable spirit that only an animal companion can bring, that unconditional love.  The loss of my beloved Larry and by extension Crook.   I am also reliving the loss of Sylvia and the loss of the meaning of "Us" as I always do within the confines how my PTSD has changed my physical and emotional body's processes.
I blogged incessantly in the month after Sylvia's death.  Each entry titled only by the date and time in which it had been written.  Those blogs are a chronicle of the immediacy of my grief of that time.  It is still extraordinarily painful for me to read them.  It took me many years before I could comprehend the fullness of that loss.  And now I find myself back from once I came, sitting in the immediacy of my incomprehensible grief just trusting that my next breath will come when it is meant to.  I can't imagine a life without Larry.  What the loss of his loving spirit and by extension of our rituals will mean for me.
His death came as a surprise much like Sylvia's had.  She had been seemingly happy, content with playing and chasing Larry around the house only to be dead eight hours later of heart failure.  For Larry, he had had some ongoing dental issues since January, an abbess then, a small lesion now. one that was to be addressed by surgery yesterday morning.  Nothing seemingly bad or out of the ordinary.  Then the mid morning call came that he had suspected bone cancer, that a small part of his jaw had already been eaten away.  That left little choice in which way to go forward.  Before Crook died I had had a week with him to spend grieving his oncoming death.  With Larry.....
I can't say that I will blog incessantly during the next month as I navigate Larry's loss.  Blogging, like journaling, doesn't hold the same value it once had in my life.  Before, both were written words, a way for me to navigate and understand what was happening in the immediacy of my emotional and physical life during a time when without them I seemed lost.  Now.....   I suppose that is because I seem to have a better grasp of my internal processes or maybe I am just doing what I naturally do in the face of intense emotion; I isolate.  Either way my path will be what it will be as I am reluctantly forced to navigate towards a new definition of self without my precious baby boy.