I am none to inspired tonight and have no particular topic in mind, but I haven’t added an entry in a while and not at all this month so I felt I should put something on the record before the year ended.
It will be 11 months since Will’s death on Saturday. We have almost made it through the first year. I don’t think I can say it was a successful journey. I feel as though I haven’t done as good a job with this grief business as I could have. I am not sure why. Read Full Article
If I could figure out what to do next I would post it on every widow’s board I could Google up. I don’t think there is a one size fits all answer though. Widowhood is no different from any other experience in life except that it hurts a lot more like a hot poker on bare flesh – forever searing. What do I want? I haven’t really sat down and had a talk with myself about that. Seriously. Just really thought about it. Like I had to do in the graduate class that gave me the two year plan I used to survive the bulk of Will’s illness. If money weren’t an object and my daughter wasn’t an issue to deal with – where would I go? What would I be or do? I work with this guy. He and his wife plan to move to England in the next couple of years with their two sons. I was telling him how I wished I could just pull up and go – live in New York or San Francisco. He said, then go. I said, no – I have a child. What would we do for money, health ins … He cut me off. Just go, he said, if you want to do it – do it. Nothing is really stopping you but details and details can always be worked out. And he was right. I am stopping me from moving on. Me. So. What do I want? It doesn’t need an answer tonight or tomorrow or even in a month. But, it is really past time to think about it. Because, the answer to that question is what will illuminate the details I need to start sorting through. I worry that time is continuing to pass me by at the speed of sound at the very least. I will be 43 in December and though 60 is the new forty and my teenage students assure me that I truly still look 35, I can’t help but remember that 5 years ago I thought I had my future planned. I have been off-road too long.
Time does not heal wounds. Time is what passes while you learn to live without the one person who meant the world to you. And it will be the hardest thing you ever do because you have to do most of it alone.
Today was his 33rd birthday. He will never be 33 though. Time, as we know it, stops for them. They are forever the person in the last photo you took of them.
The last picture I took of Will was on Christmas Day of last year. There are several of him and our daughter. She is smiling, holding the doll that I told her that her daddy had picked out especially for her. He is propped up in a recliner. His head lolling to one side. His eyes sightless and staring.
He was slightly agitated that day. Maybe he was aware? As much as I want to believe that he knew we were there and that it was Christmas Day, the bigger part of me hopes that he never had any idea. The thought of him being aware and unable to communicate that. Knowing but completely cut off to the point. That all he heard was noise and every touch or movement was startling and frightening. His every waking moment a nightmare of sensory deprivation. I hope that is not what was happening.
No one remembered that it was his birthday. It was just me, standing in the middle of the kitchen with the only candle I could find, a number four that had sat on our daughter’s birthday cake this last summer. I lit it with one of his old Bic lighters that I hadn’t thrown away. It was pink and blue and had smiley faces on it. I sang “Happy Birthday” to him and cried.
I wonder if that is how it will always be. I fear it might. Time is a bitch. It will not heal me or make anything better. Once again that is all left up to me.
anniegirl1138 