I Can't Even Imagine...

Lately I've noticed myself thinking of an activity we enjoyed and suddenly realizing we will never share it again. It's not a new thing, but it seems to shake me up more lately. Each time this happens it's as if I'd never realized it before, as if I'm learning it for the first time, and I feel a moment of panic. Maybe I'm emerging from some of the deepest denial and numbness and it's gradually beginning to occur to me, I mean really occur to me, that he's actually gone and I just don't know how to process that information yet.

I sometimes wonder what Jeff would be doing if he were in my place. I always imagined he'd cope much better than me, that he'd have handled this much more logically and he'd be a thousand steps further down the road than I am. But after listening to one of his voice mails I realized that I really don't know how he would have reacted. It was one of the last messages he'd left, a week or so before he died. He'd worked late and was letting me know he was on his way home, and as he often did when leaving voice mails, he talked about how much he loved me and how much our relationship meant to him. And he said "I can't even imagine my life without you."

It was something we said often, although we typically meant that we couldn't imagine what our lives would have been like if we'd not met. On occasion we did talk about what we'd do if the worst happened, but unless you've gone through it you can't even begin to guess at how you'll react. One of the most frequent things I've heard from friends or acquaintances who are married, is some variation of, "You're so strong, I could never handle this." Well, I was absolutely certain I wouldn't either. I would be one of those perfectly healthy widows who died shortly after her husband, not for any unknown physical ailment, but simply of grief, because I couldn't go on any longer with a broken heart.

Some days I feel his loss so strongly that it seems like the air is being sucked out of the room and I'm caught in a vacuum and I'm sure that I'm going up to bed for the last time, but no matter how horrible I feel, emotionally or physically, I'm still here. Honestly, nobody is more surprised that I'm still here and in good health than myself... but I don't think it's strength, or that I've found a way to cope, I think my body is just running on some sort of auto pilot and the rest of me has no choice but to go along for the ride.

This isn't unusual, I find. The more I read up on grief and how people respond to it the more I find that I'm not alone, there are countless other widows and widowers who have felt very similar things. It can be comforting to see that, to know that what I'm going though is normal, and that one day I will move forward and integrate these changes into my life.

Yes, that new normal idea again. I couldn't have begun to imagine.

Creating New Traditions

Tuesday was my wedding anniversary. Well, it should have been, but instead of celebrating eight years of marriage I have faced almost eight months of widowhood.

I wondered what other newly widowed folk do for wedding anniversaries… it occurs to me that in all my research I've never noticed anything about that. Do they celebrate quietly? Spend the day in grief? Try to just go about the day as if it were any other? I expect that if I asked ten different people they’d each have a different answer, so I just went with what felt right for me. I'd make my own little tradition to deal with this day.

I thought I'd create an anniversary that we might have had if he were with me. I started off with lunch at one of “our places." Not a fancy restaurant, we rarely went to those, just a nice, casual place that we'd visited many times. I hadn't been there since he died, it had become one of those places that I just couldn't bring myself to visit on my own, and that was why I chose it for this anniversary. I took the tablet along and sat it across from me with his photo displayed, so he could join me. It wasn't the same, but he was there. Sort of.

After lunch I thought about going for walks through some of the parks we liked, but the heat persuaded me to limit that stroll to one small park, and spend most of the time on a nice shaded bench. There were only a few people around but quite a lot of geese to keep me company. I followed the park up with a stop for a milkshake at another of our spots, then headed home. It was exactly the sort of day we might have spent, the perfect little anniversary outing. I could imagine him with me at every stop but I missed his physical presence more than ever. It was a pleasant day, but it was profoundly lonely.

That evening I watched our wedding video for the first time since he died, and it was easy to remember exactly how I felt that day. I often thought it was a blur, the day went by too fast, but the emotions are still vivid in my memory. I could remember being so happy I couldn't contain myself, smiling so much that I didn't think I would ever stop. My dreams had come true, I'd found the love of my life, someone to grow old with, and I would never be alone again. My fairy tale was getting it's happy ending.

After I watched that I spent a couple of hours crying, then pounding fists on the floor and screaming  until there was nothing left inside me. It's not fair. It's not. But all I can do is try to adapt, and try to find a way to go forward and forge new traditions.  In the end it was another yo-yo day, a bit more extreme than most but not unusual. I guess that's part of my new normal. And now it's onward to the next challenge, whatever that may be...

The day after our wedding we stopped by the church to pick up the decorations and other things. As we were getting ready to go home this song played on the mix cd we'd made for the reception, and I have a vivid memory of him stopping in the parking lot and singing it to me. Someday I may even be able to listen to it without crying my eyes out. Happy Anniversary, Jeff. I love you.

cross posted from Kything NaturesZen

Just a Scribble

This morning I picked up a notebook. I was going to jot something down, but found it already had a couple pages filled with Jeff's mind mapping exercises so I stopped to look through them. He liked mind maps, he would make one when he was thinking about a project, or trying to organize his thoughts. He always thought I should use them to sort out my jumbled mess of mind chatter, but I never quite got into them. He thought they were great, though, I find them around now and then. He was always overflowing with ideas, and he'd write them down whenever he had a chance.

This map was focused on our hopes for our future. He had noted things we wanted to have in our lives, and possible steps to achieve that. There were bubbles and lines all over the pages, filled with ideas about things he wanted to learn, and goals he was setting for himself. In the middle of the page he'd scribbled a little drawing in a circle to use as the focal point of the map. It's a simple little sketch, not meant to be artistic or even to be saved forever, it was just there to represent the future us, having succeeded and enjoying the fruits of our labor. In this doodle we've realized our goals. He has his arms raised up in triumph, I have my arms around him. I can even picture the image with us in place of the little scribble figures.

I can feel the joy and fulfillment he intended in the sketch. We've achieved our personal success, we have made our dreams come true. We're standing in front of our dream house, near mountains, beside a lake. He has a little wind turbine and some solar panels too, because he always had this dream we'd have a self sufficient place one day, off the grid. This is our happily ever after, the place where we will grow old together.

These are the hardest things to find, for me. The to-do lists. The dreams. The hopes, in the form of a little sketch, for a future that will never come.

It's completely undone me today.

cross posted from Kything NaturesZen

Sobbing Over Artichokes

So in the past three weeks I have ventured out of the house a few times, mostly if I need to go to the store or need to take something to someone. I never know at the beginning of the day if I’m going to accomplish anything, most mornings find me crawling back into bed and hiding for a few hours. Today started off much like that but I finally managed to rouse myself enough to make a trip to the grocery.

It’s funny where you find the grief triggers. I've accepted that just about everything is going to set me off at home, from moving something that belonged to him to seeing his handwriting on a scrap of paper to looking at the movies he still had in his Netflix queue. I listened to some old voice mails today and was unable to function for a long time. What I didn’t expect today was to have the grocery store do me in. Yet there I was, standing in the produce section and looking to see if they had any artichokes, and feeling my stomach begin to knot up.

I was never an artichoke fan, but my husband absolutely loved them. It became a standard thing when I did the shopping, cruise the produce, check the artichokes, and if they looked suitable I would always grab a couple for him to enjoy during the week. For a second my instinct was to grab one, even though I’d never eat it. Then I wanted to cry because they represented another thing he would never enjoy again. It all went downhill from there, everything in the store that he enjoyed became a new trigger for me. I managed to avoid shopping in tears, but I did exit with a bag of crullers that I didn't really need. I've already eaten most of those, by the way. I’m not proud.

I think the triggers are going to be the hardest thing to deal with, and I’m realizing that we shared so many interests and activities that I’m going to find them everywhere. I’m nowhere near the stage where I can imagine enjoying things that we once shared, or smiling at a memory instead of bursting into tears. So often I feel like I’m not only grieving the loss of his presence in my life, I feel like I’m grieving every time I think of things he won’t get a chance to do, projects that will forever be a dream, plans he was making to help out friends… and I scream at the universe because it is so unfair that he was taken away when he could have done so many more things in life.

I know my feelings, all of them, have been experienced by everyone who has lost someone they loved dearly, and I have been assured that in time, I will begin to emerge from the worst of it and find a path to healing. On day 22 that path still seems to be a long way away from me, but I will do my best to be confident that I will find my way to it when I’m ready.

(cross posted from Kything NaturesZen)

It's Not Just a Down, It's a Bottomless Chasm

I've had other widows tell me that it can get a little worse before it gets better. It is getting worse for me lately, and I think that is because the initial utter shock has worn off. Yet the unreality has not, in fact it seems even more unreal now than it did in that first week. It's harder than ever to accept that he is dead, and I don't know why.

The first week, even the first two weeks, I think I was still able to maintain a distance from all of it. I was so numb I couldn't think of anything, I knew he was gone but for some reason it wasn't fully registered in my brain. It's the same now, but the loss feels a thousand times worse lately. I look at his photos and have a meltdown. I look at his things and do the same. Tonight I looked at the products that had been sitting on the Amazon wishlist, one that we shared, and began sobbing uncontrollably because he will never be able to sit down and read the how-to books he'd marked, or learn the new programming tricks, or get that cool tea maker he was researching.

It seems that now half the time I cry for my loss, and the other half I cry because he can never experience these things, and because the people who knew him will never be able to interact with him again.

Sometimes I've asked myself what would he have done, if the situation were reversed and I'd been the one to go suddenly and without warning? We'd mentioned it a few times, casually, and he was always pretty adamant that he'd expect me to go on and do great things. I told him, no, I'm going with you. If you go first, I'm going with you, and he'd shake his head. He wanted me to be independent and strong. I'd like to think that if he were here, in place of me, he would be carrying on with a much calmer demeanor. He'd carry on with our plans, he'd live life to the fullest. That was what I'd have wanted him to do.

I don't know why I find it so profoundly difficult to contemplate that my life will go on.

I spent time at a bookstore tonight, recharging myself and looking for texts that might be helpful. In the past few days I've been building my reading list, the first of which was one of the books that was transformative in my hub's life: The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. I had read it when we first met because it was a tremendously important book to him, but it didn't click with me as he would have liked. Lately, though, I feel a need to reread this and hope to begin to have a better understanding of how my husband could maintain his calm, his quiet mind, his feeling of peace. I feel like it will draw me closer to him, and maybe it will ease my mind somewhat as well.

19 Days, my love. I miss you.