The 2nd year has been harder for me. The 2nd year after losing my husband of 40 years. Last year, my head said: he’s just at work. This year my head knows better. This, this being without him, is forever.
I’ve decided that mostly we are so distracted by our “shoulds” that we miss our “can dos”. We don’t even think about them – what we might do if we got out from under our shoulds. Like stay in pjs until 11 a.m. and play phone games til midnight which is way beyond witching hour for me. Or was.
So those of us (me) left to pick up the remnants of “shoulds” might take a breath and wonder if we really want to reshoulder the shoulds again after all.
This week I realized I have what I said I wanted. OMG be careful what you wish for. Once I wished to “live in the question.” Where I currently find myself still living. I call it “the space called not knowing.” Then I said I wanted, in the midst of his death, my howling grief, and dealing with getting the house sold with a hitch at every turn, that I wanted quiet and ordinary. By which I meant no crises to deal with at every breath. Now I have both. Quiet and not knowing (which is also called grief and grief has its own knowing that it does not share, simply drags you along with it).
I’ve read, somewhere, that a grieving person wants to “get back to something I recognize,” and, while that is exactly what I wanted, I have changed so much that I am on a new planet where I recognize shapes but not myself within them. In the midst of quiet, I, who am so used to chaos of one sort of another (often called “life,” I guess) that I don’t know how to dwell here.
Outside a squirrel buries acrons that will grow trees I have to rip up next spring. I find the planting divits all over the red mulch despite the squirrel’s careful patting down and smoothing over.
Perhaps I am planting seeds and leaving signs without knowing yet, following some instinctive unconscious direction from ancestors I don’t know (on the birth side or the adopted side -I get both, a “gift” of abundance).
On the patio a mourning dove walks alone In my head, my husband says, “do-de-doh,” because that’s how the doves walk. He wo’t stay out of my head. Some days I want to throw out all the pictures and start over. Whateer that means.
Elsewhere people are picking up after Hurricane Helene. There are all kinds of hurricanes. As Helene has shown, named and tracked, no one expects it to be “that bad.” Until it is. I understand. You don’t know until you do.
1 Comment
Tammy,
You’ve been on my mind. I’ve missed you. So I came here to your website and I see you’ve lost your husband. I’m sorry. And I’m sorry you’re going through it. And I’m sorry for the unkind things I said on Facebook a few years back that drove us apart. I hope you’ll accept my apology.