Time loops.

12 full weeks have passed. That amazes me, I can't imagine how 12 weeks have passed by already. Sometimes it doesn't even feel like 12 hours could have passed.

I don't feel any different. Some days are good. More often I think I feel worse than ever.

You occasionally hear people talk about someone who was widowed, who died soon after their spouse. People say they died of a broken heart. I thought I would. I was sure I would. 

But it didn't happen. I'm still here.

And I go on.

That was fast...

Onward to your next adventure

So I looked at Jeff's Facebook today and it's been 'memorialized'... so now I can't log into it anymore and it will never change. That's probably for the best. He won't keep showing up as a suggested friend, his birthday won't appear in lists, and I won't keep getting suggestions about adding little details about how we met to my timeline.

I also noticed that my fear that it would suddenly "unmarry" me from him was unfounded. It seems that as long as I never change my relationship status on my own account then his page will always read "was married to" me. I can't imagine ever updating that, so that did make me feel a tiny bit better. I know it's a silly thing to worry over, but it is what it is.

But overall It was still hard, it was like another little reminder that he's not here, and for some reason those are hitting me harder now than they had in the weeks after he died. I wonder if it's because some of the numbness has started to wear off and I'm realizing I need to face life alone? So far this year has been like reliving the beginning of November all over. There are days I can't even imagine how I'm going to make it all the way through. I often wonder if the pain ever really becomes easier, or if you just get used to living with that knot in your stomach?

I miss you so much. I miss our adventures. I know that now you're off on some amazing adventure that I can't share, but I will still think of you every second of every day.

Leaving Memorials

Jeff's photography, from his Facebook

This week I began to think about what to do with Jeff’s Facebook account. I have access to it, we always shared passwords with each other and I can access most of his online accounts, so I have a few options. I can leave it active, as it is now, I can delete it entirely, or I can ask Facebook to memorialize it. That will lock it down, frozen in time, a memorial to the thoughts and images he shared. I had always considered that the best option, but I’ve been resisting it for a while, it would be another way of acknowledging that he's really gone, and in my heart I still don't want to do that.

It also occurs to me that by memorializing Jeff's account it will probably cause the relationship status on my own account to change. Now I'm not entirely sure about this, it might still read the same, but it made me wonder if it might be time to change that status over to read "widowed."  That's a label I've been resisting, it sounds so permanent and final. I don't feel like a widow, I still feel married, I'm just married to a man who seems to have always left the room before I came in. I know that there's no need to make any changes to the way I label myself on something as relatively insignificant as Facebook, in fact there's no need to display any relationship status at all. Still, I'm thinking that maybe this is another step on my journey of healing. I'm rebuilding my life, and perhaps taking ownership of the term "widow," even if it is only a mental acknowledgement of my new identity,  is a small step in continuing to work on accepting that Jeff has died, and my life is not as it was.

In preparation for changing over the account I went back through Jeff's timeline and read through his status updates. In the process I found myself reliving a lot of little moments of the past few years. He didn’t update his status often, so each post is extra special to me. Each was an insight into what he was doing, what he was thinking, into which technologies he’d stumbled across and found so cool he just had to share them with everyone. I could feel his enthusiasm in each update. I could feel his optimism and his hope for the future. I could remember every time he told me about something that he’d just found, and how excited he was about new ideas and innovation. Reading through that was much harder than I would have imagined, It made my grief feel very fresh again.  I cried not just for my own loss, but because the world will never know what he could have made of his plans, and what he might have created. It’s not fair. He should have had forty more years to pursue his dreams.

Even though it's hard to look back at things that prompt memories I don't want to hide from them. Remembering him and talking about him is important to me. But there are times that all of the memories do become too difficult, the pain is too much to bear and I have to step back and find a way to distract myself and try to bring my mood back up. My challenge this year is to curb my instinct to use comfort foods to do that. A little treat is fine, a never ending stream of high fat, carb laden food is not. At least, it's not for me, the temporary happiness I gain from that 1400 calorie pint of ice cream never seems to make up for the way I feel after I eat it, and the fifteen pounds that have joined me in the past couple of months are proof that I need to find a better way to comfort myself. I need to spend less time thinking about cookies as a mood lifter, and more time losing myself in books, in hobbies, in music, in idle, silly daydreams.

75 days have come and gone, but I'm still breathing. It's an ongoing battle, but I'm holding on.

cross posted from Kything NaturesZen

64 Days

64 days.

I don’t really have anything to blog this afternoon, except to mark that it has been 64 days, and that felt significant to me. We always liked 64. It was the year we were both born, Jeff near the beginning of the year, me close to the end, so of course that made the whole year special. 64 was something we had in common. 64 was the number we always took notice of, if we saw it somewhere. We allowed it to be the number that would remind us we needed to pay attention to what was going on around us so we wouldn’t miss anything.

I haven’t been counting off the exact number of days since he died, not since the first month. I’ve tracked weeks, but not days. I knew it was 9 weeks on Friday. It’s been two months. When I looked up the days this morning it made me pause for a moment. Sixty four. It makes me wonder if the universe is telling me to be extra observant today. To watch for something I don’t want to miss. Maybe it’s just that extra reminder that we should always be paying attention to the world around us.

64 days, Jeff. What do you want me to know today?

Now What Do We Do?

It's a new year now. New year, and one where I will be completely on my own.

New moon, too. Fresh starts. Somehow seems fitting to me, as if there's a message in here for me to get myself in order.

Tonight I'm missing conversation. I think I miss this even more because I don't have an office job anymore, I don't have people I talk to every day. Lately, unless I go to the store and exchange a few moments of chitchat with a clerk, or someone in a checkout line, I don't talk at all, except to myself, for several days in a row.

When the ball dropped at midnight and all the happy party-goers in Times Square turned to someone for their new years kiss I began to cry again. I miss my kiss. We only celebrated seven new years together, and that wasn't enough.

While the firecrackers went off outside I spent my new years gazing at his photo, telling him my fears, but also my hopes, my dreams, my goals. Our goals.

But I still miss my kiss.