It seems that every time I try to be nice, she reacts with a negative view towards me and my message.

You might be interested in this letter, I said to her as she lies on the couch reading her daily newspaper.

“No I wouldn’t,” she replies without even glancing up from the newsprint. It’s a notice about school and a chance to go to college. But she won’t even look at the letter about her son.

No matter what the subject, I feel a darkness of negativity aimed right at me when we talk. There seems to be a  lack of  energy about her. The routine movements of the day seem to tire her out; she has no patience for any change in her schedule; has no will to try something new.

Over and over again, she has told us that she has “nothing to live for.” It hurts me to hear it. It hurts my son. It is all part of the deep depression that has enveloped her the past three years after the fall and the subsequent traumatic brain injury.

I keep hoping that a light will shine through the grief, that a slim sparkle of life might ignite something in side of her, but I face only a darkened, bordered up hovel where my home together with her once resided.

I wish to God that I could give her part of my life, my optimism, my positive outlook in a world of uncertainties and constant change. Take my smile, take my peace, take my love. You can pretend they are yours and fake it until you possibly get over the death of who you once were and begin to seek an opportunity to find a new Self within you.

I run away each time you say “no.” Each time you say you “can’t,” each time you adamantly shut the door on idea after idea to get you out of your shell and into the light outside. If left alone, I know you could too easily shrivel up with your memories of a former newspaper life; your non-fiction, political internet reading; your empty walls that have ben erected around your Self for a possible death watch.

You are not the person you were before your accident. Neither am I. And I know I will never feel the pain and loss you went through as your whole world seemed to collapse; you lost your job, you lost your health insurance, you lost your reason for living. No one who has never faced that tragedy could possibly know what you have gone through.

But, if I could, I would drag you up from that place you have burrowed into. Pull you up to a remodelled floor where you could start over, albeit, without the skills and social graces that diminished with the blow to your head. You still have your beautiful Self inside, and once you realize that, you can breathe in the fresh air of revival, a rebirth of who and what you were and still can be, that positive child who has the world ahead of her to engage, explore and conquer.

Help me to help you.

Please, don’t say No.