Good morning folks. This is going to be one of those blog posts that does not get syndicated widely, because it is going to be a bummer. Last night I fell asleep on the couch around 7ish… went to bed around 8pm… and then slept until almost 7 am. This represents probably the longest I have slept in years. I feel like the wheels are falling off now. Technically I am still functional. I am getting up and showing, feeding myself, doing responsible work things, and making sure the house stays at moderate levels of cleanliness… but I feel like I am not really living. I am still chipping away at the giant mess in the garage, and am about halfway through. Essentially the north side is finished with cabinets set up and things moved into them… and I need to attack the south side and effectively do the same. I have a pile of shit in the garage that at some point I will call the folks to haul away.
I can’t say with all certainty that nothing brings me joy… but more… I have forgotten what joy feels like. I feel like I have been cosplaying someone who has their shit together in the whole “fake it until you make it” genre… but I am just not sure if I will ever get there. This week is hard. It is fall break for all of the schools in Oklahoma, and I did not even know this until a coworker asked for it off to spend time with his family. This was always a big week for us and we almost always had some sort of project going on that we would complete. If nothing else it was a time when I took off from work and we spent quality time together. We would often go for trips elsewhere like down to Dallas, up to Kansas City, or over to St Louis to visit friends. I could do all of these things… but I just don’t really feel like doing so.
Last Friday was really hard too, because there was a cookout essentially in honor of my wife… but not having her… made the social interaction almost unbearable. People talk about having emotional support animals… but my wife was my emotional support human and I miss her greatly. No matter how uncomfortable a situation got… I always had her, and I always knew that she understood that my skin was crawling and that I wanted to run into the night screaming at the top of my lungs. How do you condense 30 years of moments shared… into even beginning to rebuild that connection with anyone else? I feel like my life is over… and I am just this shambling husk that remains, because all of the good that was in me was sucked out the night I came out of the bathroom and found her making that awful gurgling noise on the couch. My life ended on July 2nd… and everything that I am doing now… is just a vague attempt at distracting me from that fact.
Another thing that is really hard… is that in theory they should have installed the gravestone last week. There is a certain finality in that act. Like until that happened it almost wasn’t “really real”. I’ve not gone up to check, because its a two hour drive away, and I am not even sure if I should be doing that drive by myself. I had been waiting on a call from the funeral home to let me know that it was installed… but they have also been pretty much incompetent at every step of this process. They did not tell me when the death certificates were available, did not tell me when the final death certificates were available, and did not tell me when they had a mock-up of the tombstone ready for me to review. If I did not have a “fuck this is taking forever” moment at each step… I would not have gotten any of the information. So basically… I have Schrodinger’s tombstone right now… and the only way I am going to know for certain is if I make the drive.
I’ve not gone to the grave site… since the day we buried her because… there has never felt like much of a point. She is not there anymore. My wife herself firmly believed that, and thought the whole visiting graves thing was a bit weird. I mean if she is anywhere… she would be here since she died in the driveway. Not that I understand the mechanics of hauntings mind you… but it would seem like the place someone dies would be more potent than the place where their remains end up. I know at some point I will need to go. I will need to at least for the sake of her family make the effort of decorating her grave, since they all seem to care deeply about that sort of thing. I am agnostic at best… and atheist at worst… and I have always struggled with the rituals of a predominantly evangelical society. I know I have people who are willing to be there for me… but what they can offer me… isn’t what I need. I need my wife back.
I have friends who are pushing me to get back into therapy. Essentially how the free therapy works is that you get five sessions per instance. In theory I could just keep making up a reason for why I need therapy, because it is only ever dealt with at the inception of the therapy… and not during the sessions themselves. It did help… but only those first three of five sessions or so. I think I might just be going through a low spot with the changing of the seasons and the coming of the season of darkness. I’ve never had seasonal affective disorder… my wife had that… and I have always cursed the existence of the sun. However maybe I do need to get out more and at least pretend I am a daywalker. I am trying to get out and about more on the weekends, but mostly just because I have things I need to get done. I know today I am going to run to the recycling place because it was entirely too full on Sunday, and I never unloaded the boxes from my truck.
Maybe I just needed to cry for awhile. I have been doing so while I write this post, and am honestly feeling a bit better as a result. Unfortunately crying is not one of those things that you can just sort of force to happen. Maybe I needed to get some of the sadness out of me. I will say that I would be completely lost if not for Gracie and how needy of attention she is. So many of the things I did… because I was trying to take care of my wife. Without her… it just doesn’t feel like there is a point to doing any of them. I have mostly been going through the motions because the routines are familiar… but there is no passion behind it anymore. I think I am going to cut this blog post off, because if you have read down to this point… you are a real one.
I am not sure if I have been lying to you… when I say that I am fine… or if this week just got to be too much and I fell apart. I am broken, and I have to admit that I am broken. I just am not sure if I will ever be fixed.
I wrote this over to you on discord, but then I realized that my main form of communication may not be yours, so I am posting it here in the hopes that you see it.
Reaching out, I’m bad at it, but I read your blog post and wanted to reach out. I’m sorry it’s so hard (existing, being the ‘it’s’ in this scenario). I have zero experience in anything like it, so I have no words of comfort or thoughts to make any of it better and I’m even really bad at keeping in touch and being a friend, but I think about you and your situation often, even if I don’t muster up the oomph to give a nudge. I think it’s OK and still expected to be falling apart, given the co-dependency of your relationship with your wife. You need to keep being gentle with yourself. Especially during the tough days. You’re still doing the year for the first time by yourself. Each experience (like fall, changing of seasons, etc) is a ‘first’ that requires that adjustment that is just a memory of how it used to be vs. how it is now. Anyway, sorry for rambling, all of this is just to say that I’m here, I read your posts, you’re heard. I think you’re doing as well as can be expected, given the gravity of the situation. A few weeks ago I actually sent you a rambling ‘I need to reach out’ message but I ended up removing it because uhhh well I don’t know why I did, I just did. Anyway. Gentle hugs.
Grief becomes a part of you, and I doubt it ever goes away. Death of someone you love is hard; I lost my beloved daughter, Shannon, when she was seven months old. My parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents, best friends, there is so much death in my life, so much grieving that is just building up. I’m not the oldest in my generation; I assume some of my older cousins on my mother’s side have passed on, but they are Trumpers and I haven’t talked to them in many years, so who knows?
I’m the oldest on my dad’s side, so all eyes on me.
There’s just so much death all around. After awhile, you just grow numb to it. And cling to those you have left. Life is fragile. We treasure our loved ones while we have them. What else can we do?
Big internet hugs! Grief is an absolute asshole who leaves for a bit and then comes back to shove your face back into the pile of it repeatedly. I hope you get another breather soon before you are overwhelmed again. I still get hit by my Dad passing and it will be four years in November. I expect that will always be the case.
I really do love your “emotional support human” term and will be stealing that. It conveys exactly how I feel about my partner after going through all the shit we have gone through since Covid together.
Thank you for being you and sharing with us.
Grief is not linear. Sometimes you will be fine, or fine enough to think you’re fine, and then there will be days you are anything but. Don’t ever feel you’re lying – you’re using the best available information at the time, and the people who care about you should understand that. <3
I can barely imagine what you are going through.
What I do know is that, at least in my experience, grief doesn’t play fair. That whole “Five stages of grief” model may have some truth to it, but the feelings don’t conform to a simple sequence of steps.
There is no checklist: the feelings come up at the darnedest times, with no regard to logic or convenience. I hope you can find the calm space to open yourself to those feelings and establish emotional ‘anchors’ in the form of people you can talk about it with. Going it alone, as much as it fits with our nature, is probably not the best approach.