crying

you may not even recognize yourself these days. your numbness might come and go. tears may push through when you are driving or when you wake in the middle of the night or when you go to the bathroom at work. you may cry so hard that tears and snot and spit just spill from your face onto the ground and there is nothing you can do to stop it until it is good and done and over. you may not be eating what you should. or you may be eating more than you did before, trying to fill up the hole that sits raw edged and throbbing in the center of your chest.

you may not be able to be with other people without them bringing it up, or pointedly not, you may not know what to say, or know if it is ok to laugh. or what happens if you start to cry?

about crying, if you breathe out, a forceful breath blown through your mouth like you are exasperated.... and if you look up without moving your head and blink a lot-- you can sometimes push through the immediate need to cry. sometimes. tell yourself you will let yourself cry as soon as you can. but the blowing, and the looking up and blinking saved me a million times, even if it only bought me the 30 seconds i needed to turn away, or close the door, or to pull off the road.

crying comes and goes. times it will flood in and pin you down and other times days will pass. as times goes on, this pattern will repeat- times of big grief, and times of relative calm. things will remind you of her, things you may not expect. with jeff, it is a tractor for sale by the side of the road. or a trout stream running high in spring time. or any dodge power wagon.

sometimes so innocently you'll catch yourself thinking there is something you want to tell her, or something you'll show her next time you drive by... and then you'll realize, re-realize, and you need to be gentle with yourself with what happens next. it may be laughter. or crying. or fury. or disbelief as you rediscover your circumstances. you may feel like an idiot for forgetting-- how can you possibly forget? but remember, this may be huge, the most huge thing ever, but it is not who you are. it is just one big honking piece of your experience. however big, it is not everything and will not be everything. and in any given moment, the thing that we are doing is surviving. that is what we do. we survive. we drive our cars carefully. we go to work. we eat. we sleep. we dream. we see a hawk overhead and think of the person we have lost, tell ourselves we will tell them when we get home. and then we realize that it is not going to happen like that.

new year's

so we are coming up on new year's eve
and times like these can be particularly tough.

but here is something to consider:
this new year? this new year is a year in which this did not happen.

self protection

be self protective

you do not owe anyone information or an explanation or details or anything else that you don't want to share. i found i told people too much in the beginning, shared too much as i was flailing my way through those amazingly difficult first days...

people will ask you things that you cannot believe they will ask

how she did it, did you find her, did she leave a note, if you knew she was going to do it....

my sister gave me the best advice-- come up with a simple line or two that is non-negotiable. memorize it. use it to give yourself time to decide what you want to share and what you don't and with whom.

"i am sure you'll understand that this is just too painful for me to talk about"

Waking

you may wake up in the middle of the night or in the morning or in the afternoon. there may be a lull, a moment, a quiet peacefulness. and then there is the crushing feeling as you remember. when you realize it was not a dream. when you realize that you have lost so many precious things, including the ability to go back and un-do whatever you feel you have done that led to this moment.

if it is night, you may lie there and systematically torture yourself with thoughts of what might have been, if only. you may play the death in your head as you imagine it. you may play the finding, the losing, the horrible first moments over and over and over.

tell yourself to stop. if you can't stop, get up. if you can sleep, do. let yourself sleep if you possibly can.

if you wake up and it is morning, there may be things you have to do. decisions you have to make. where the body needs to go. what to do. you may have to talk with the police again. talk with the medical examiner. talk with the funeral home. cremation? burial? obituary?

some of these choices you will need to make quickly. others can wait.
you can and will make these choices. there is no wrong way to do this.

things will cost more than you can imagine. order more death certificates than you think you need. the funeral director is someone who may be able to help in more than one way- may be able to offer insight and solace as someone who has been with death, including suicides, before. very few of us have. none of us should have to. but they can offer this: that it is not about love or the failure of love to perform miracles. it is about the person who has killed themselves. they made the choice. no matter how much they may have felt there was no choice, there was.