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