Wednesday's Woe - "Hair-Trigger Grievers" ~by Tommy Prince

Wednesday's Woe

"Hair-Trigger Grievers"

~by Tommy Prince

Hair-Trigger...

Wiktionary:

"hair-trigger" - a trigger that will set off a firearm when even a small pressure is applied

Free Dictionary:

"hair-trigger" - responding to the slightest provocation or stimulation; a hair-trigger temper; a hair-trigger reaction

Farlex Trivia Dictionary

"hair-trigger" - its underlying meaning is something that may be triggered with the pressure of something as slight as a hair.

Merriam-Webster Dictionary

"hair-trigger" - immediately responsive to the slightest stimulus

*****

On Facebook today, Angie had thanked a friend for praying for her recently because she finds herself "seemingly stuck in a swamp of PTSD." A grieving-mother friend read the comment and asked Angie what her symptoms of PTSD are. Today, I will give you real-life examples of one of Angie's PTSD symptoms. (And, I must admit, I have these exact same symptoms too.)

Over the past 5 1/2 years, we often found ourselves in a place in our grief where we did not even have the energy to deal with certain modern-day demands, so many of of them were simply left undone. What we were too depressed and despondent to even deal with in those years, seems now to simply have traded symptoms as we are now trying to "re-enter" life to some degree, attempting now to tackle these potentially-overwhelming situations. Instead of being depressed and despondent, now it seems we are disorganized, agitated, hyper-vigilant, and hyper-startled in a "hair-trigger" kind of attempt at functioning...

Through no fault of our own, we had last-minute tax hurdles thrown our way that over-complicated our already-complicated-tax-situation that had to be completed in just a few days. And not only for us, but also for our two sons, so Angie had to figure the numbers out for all of us on some overly complex tax forms (she had to figure out first) which we had never even known existed until this year. By the time she was done with all of it and had it wrapped up in envelopes for me to rush to the Post Office, I know she must have invented several new expletives for her already teeming vocabulary of choice words. Funny, she never even cussed until she had lived with me for a few years...

Then I get a harassing phone call, well, it was expected, but it sure felt harassing... Repairs have been going on for almost a year now on one of our recreation-type vehicles. The call came from this repairman who proceeds to tell me he has gone way over-budget to complete all the tasks required (along with quite a few he decided-on-his-own to add), with no fair-warning ever made to us over these weeks and months to advise us of the situation before he decided to go full-speed ahead in spending our money. Our bill is now almost double of the estimate, which was an amount we already thought we could barely afford. Well you can imagine, when I got off the phone and delivered this information to Angie, she hit the roof!

And speaking of the roof... Then I get a call from the roof repairman who starts demanding the final payment that our mortgage company was supposed to release to us but wouldn't. The mortgage company's idea of releasing a claims check to our roofer for kindly repairing our hail-damaged roof 8 months ago was to send Angie and me 23 pages of uncomprehendable legal mumbo jumbo full of hoops they want Angie and me to jump through first before they will pay our roofer when we (nor our roofer) have done anything wrong. But to the roof repairman, I did want to say, How were we to know our mortgage company would throw a hissy fit before releasing their final check which by law they have to release???!!!

Even our own income has been tripped up by complications that are way outside our control, but we are having to do twice the "leg-work" to be sure the appropriate persons within the overly complex payor-system get the magnitude of hand-written duplicate documents sent to them so that they can correct their system with our documents before we can get our checks. And this conundrum has been drawn out over the past five months now....

And last but not least, Angie has not even had the courage to open the certified-mail-package she received a few days ago from certain of her family members because her grieving-mother's heart is afraid she will be re-traumatized by their potentially-toxic ways of handling some very sensitive matters...

Ahhh, such is life-in-the-fast-lane for these "hair-trigger, barely-functioning child-loss grievers"...

Picture, thanks to Grieving Mothers