I was ready to go to sleep, and then I watched an episode of House in which the 5 stages of grieving were mentioned repeatedly. Crap. Now my mind's awake and brooding again....ugh! I read about these stages in Mother Earth News when I was a teen....because Elizabeth Kubler Ross looked old to me then, I didn't pay a lot of attention to her article. I thought it was something old people had to deal with. I didn't know that life was about to smack me down hard within the next year or two, that I'd never be that innocent, happy and optimistic again or that grief may or may not involve people kicking the bucket. I never thought I'd become a cynic.

For reference, proper notation, avoidance of plagiarism, and general usefulness: Kubler Ross and the five stages of grief. I particularly like this quote:

"People often think of the stages as lasting weeks or months. They forget that the stages are responses to feelings that can last for minutes or hours as wening flip in and out of one and then another. We do not enter and leave each individual stage in a linear fashion. We may feel one, then another and back again to the first one."

And that makes me feel better.....

I don't want to be a bitter, cynical thing...I want to be the happy, free bird that I used to be. I wish I knew how to get back to being that person again. But it was...what....almost 22 years ago? We grow, we change. Life changes us.