Mom's been gone for nearly four decades and it's still impossible for me to accept. My frantic and futile tries to get the very latest cancer information in order to get help to her seem to have been just hours ago.

I'm tired and in a state of sleepless panic.

Forgetful, deeply saddened, spacey, I'm in pain.

Not sure if I can get a grip on myself. The frightful sense that I might be or get discouraged enough during this or one of these Novembers to take some wrong action permanently ending the yearly torture -- by mistake -- gets harder each year, or it seems so when November stalks me again. Desire for mind-numbing drink, any available escapist drugs, the notion of suicide is sometimes intermittent, sometimes just apparent in a kind of unnamed dread even as I know I would not do the latter on purpose I worry that I might get myself into some kind of accidental circumstance that would result in a split second, certainly unconscious decision to permanently end this pain. Leaving behind two sons a daughter-in-law and a husband to grief that would cripple them at least for a time...that's not a fate I want for any of us.

But here it is again, the intense malaise that steals up on me when the leaves have, most of them, fallen, an inexorable entrapment creeping over my mind like a tight-fitting and willfully cruel shroud. This is happening the 37th time. I am a November Grief Veteran.