a year

it is almost a year since she died.
you know it by the feel of the air, the smell of the leaves, the woodsmoke, the frost that lies in the valleys. you know it in your bones, in the center of your heart, in the back of your mind, in the middle of your throat. you know it in the clenched hands, in the dreams that turn stones and find bottles of pills, and you walk by and touch a blanket you know she touched, and you imagine the last few hours of her life even if you do not want to.
you will be flooded with this, even if you think you won't be. it is not a curse of the damned, just the tide coming in, it will come in, flood the lowlands, sweep away all safe places to step and leave slippery mud that holds footprints. you may not even know it, you may find yourself retreating, or picking fights, or walking into doorways. you may have trouble tying your shoes, or when you bend over to pick up a pencil, your eyes will fill with tears. there is no right way through this, there is only through. love may have found you in a million ways. walls might have been torn down and news ones erected, floors laid, windows repositioned, but it is still the same house. it is impossible to change anything enough.

i have no secret to survival, it is just that i survive. it is what i do with each choice i make or don't make, it is in waking in the middle of the night with my heart on fire with aching and learning to look at the moon.
the first year lasted forever, i was not sure how i would get through it. but i did. you did. you have. you will. this is the only time you will ever need to make it through the first year.
they say the first year is the hardest, and in some ways that is true, but i cannot promise it gets easier. it just gets different. acuity is replaced by ache. guilt and memory remain and haunt. i wish i could say otherwise. but there are a billion unanswered questions of what if and if only, and no matter how many years pass, those answers just do not come. they just can't.

advice? mark the occasion but safely and not in-the-moment. allow yourself to be busy or elsewhere or with friends. mark the occasion by standing by the stream, tasting maple syrup from a spoon, talking to her about how you actually feel. there is no need to be nice or not nice. go ahead and be honest. i think it helps to be angry even in the midst of sadness. this is not a simple grief, it is complex no matter how many amazing wonderful things may have happened since. but you may not be angry. you may no longer be sad. whatever you are and wherever you are, you are.

my path is just that: mine. yours is yours. i wish i could write to you to let you know that i am thinking of you, and holding you gently in my heart. hoping you will be gentle with your own. but this opens my own wounds--brings up all the festering sadness that lurks, for me, just below the surface. for me, and perhaps for many, this remains such an interior wound, and just because it is not visible does not mean it is not there.

anniversary

so today would have been my 10th wedding anniversary, i guess it is anyway. it is. i guess it is.
i think back on that kate, that hopeful open hearted kate, and wish her not foresight, no, not really. i just wish she could have had her dream a little longer. no, that's not true. i wish she could have had her dream.

i wished even then and most of all for jeff to make other choices, to have been able to stay present, to feel joy, to take pleasure in life and in our life, and in me. i wish this all could have been different. i wished and wish that love was somehow more powerful than that.
sometimes i used to wish for clairvoyance, the kind that would have had me make other choices, choices that would allow me to avoid falling apart, having my heart so broken, having and causing so much pain. and that makes sense. it does.

and now i also realize that some of my sadness comes because i just miss who i used to be-- that person who said with such a open heart "forever", and meant it. and i think that is where some of the pain comes from, from meaning it. from meaning it with all my heart and losing anyway.

as i move forward through life, i find myself avoiding forevers, disbelieving that they are possible or safe. and i miss the person i used to be so badly it aches almost as much as missing the man i married and the relationship i thought i might have, and the dreams i had for our future. oh how i miss that kate.

it was such a beautiful day, filled with clear light of early autumn and a blue sky and puffy clouds.
we stood on a bluff over looking the ocean, and i remember how my heart felt when i said forever. my heart was open, it felt like it was true.

where we were standing

in this season, i wake most mornings blue and heavy and with my throat knotted.

today is an anniversary, the day of the week, not the day of the month

the day where jeff killed himself.

and i cannot believe how sharp the pain is 6 years later. how acute the memories are of how i spent that day, down at my sister's, the wind blowing, the air clear, sunshine and clouds. she cut my hair in the back yard... and the little pieces just blew away.

the weather that day was like the day we were married, and days like that still pull my heart with their beauty and half wildness and the sadness that comes up faster than i can talk it down.

memory comes so fast, faster than i can react, and emotions just seep and well and flood and i am stumbling around half here, half there.

trying so hard to stay present and failing failing failing.

i circle around and around and around to the last time i saw him, i remember where we were standing. i remember what he was wearing, the awkward kiss we shared. the sound of his voice. how he smelled. the overwhelming love i felt and the deep and twisted pain of everything we had been going through. and oh god how tired i was, so tired of fighting so hard to keep hold of something that in so many ways was already gone.

time

time passes, but it is marked by a million incremental anniversaries.

for me every night at around 11 i would think of jeff dying. each sunday night. each monday day i would hear the echo of my own voice from those first moments. each 10th. each 11th.  i ached at the light of each nearly full moon. then after a long while, time started becoming more normal. finally a sunday could pass without the brusing slap of recognition. but the moon, the moon dogged me for over a year-- i could barely stand to look at it, as if somehow it was the moon's fault it was there and i wasn't, and somehow it was the moon's fault that it was a reminder that if i had been there, maybe i could have stopped it.  

then there are the other things- holidays that feel broken and aimless and surreal. 

wedding anniversaries that almost cannot be contemplated. that do not seem possible. who were those people? 

 

and then there are birthdays

today jeff would have turned 50. my heart has been inside out since before i opened my eyes. since before i remembered. bodies hold memory perhaps better than minds do. i have staggered through the day raw and tender and cringing against the upwelling.

goddamn it. i did not miss this acuity, this sharp ache, this fucking powerless grief.

one morning

there will be a morning when you wake up and you do not think of this first.
you will be astonished.
and then, you may feel a tidalwave of guilt.

it may be because time has passed and the complexity of life is starting to reassert itself. you may be thinking of where you may want to live, you may be looking at houses or apartments or spending time imagining what it would be like to be somewhere else, imagining moving, starting again somewhere far away.

it may be because something else has happened. witnessing a car accident did it for me. the next morning when i woke up, i thought of that first. the intensity of being the first one on the scene. the words i kept saying as i ran forward please be alive please be alive please be alive. and somehow, somehow he was.
that next morning, i thought of him first.
then i thought of jeff.
my stomach clenched with guilt as if i had been somehow untrue.

this is just life happening. and you are ok. and it does not mean you do not care. that you are not grieving. that you are not honoring the person you lost.
it does not feel as if this is true but it is.

identity

sometimes you may feel as if you do not know what to do with yourself. you do your days the old way, go to work, come home, eat... but you are no longer the you that you were. people treat you like you are normal, no one stops and stares at the grocery. but you are going through your days like a paper bag of broken glass.

it is the oddest thing ever to rediscover and rediscover and rediscover the loss, like a tongue worrying the hole where a tooth has fallen out....

you will find that pieces of your old self are in that bag-- that some of the things that mattered still matter. but there are a lot of unfamiliar pieces too. maybe some days you will also look in the mirror and wonder who you are. you are no longer the person you were, you are no longer the person this had not happened to...

you wake up each day
day after day
this is the first thing you think about

you may not even remember when you were worried about other things, your job maybe, or getting enough exercise. now much of life may seem to be on automatic pilot- you get up, brush your teeth, go to work, interact as if you are normal, come home, eat, sleep.
but this is always with you. sometimes you look in the mirror and cannot believe there is not a gaping hole in your chest.

there is such loneliness in this. no one else is you. it is not as if someone else grieving with you would make you feel less alone. of course, lots of other people are grieving too. it is just that no one can lessen the load of it for anyone else. at night, when you close your eyes, it's just you.

try to be gentle with yourself. a few months in, when the funeral is well over and people have returned to their lives, you will find yourself alone in a different way. you may need to seek out friends, they may no longer be seeking you out.

i used to go driving. or to a bookstore. somewhere where i was away, but around people, but not needing to interact.

but one of the haunting things, one of the things i worried most about, was who i was, who i was becoming. and oh, missing the person i had been. it is nested grieving. the loss of your loved one, your friend, your partner. and the loss of the you that you were.