Five Months
Five months. Five entire months without Jason. I still can’t imagine a life without Jason. But I’ve been doing it for 153 days. I feel like I’m trying to breathe underwater. Every day I get a little closer to the surface, but many days I sink back down, slowly and to different depths. I swim back up but I am never above the surface. These months were full of milestones, all front loaded on the year of firsts after of losing Jason. Our first anniversary, his birthday, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years. Some days I don’t know how I’m still standing, but I am, and I’m here. I remind myself daily that is enough.
The door has finally closed on the holiday season (thank God). The last 6+ weeks felt a lot like a game Russian Roulette. The days since New Years have felt (mostly) like the calm after the storm. It is quiet. But it is a quiet I think I’ve desperately needed. I’ve started to notice a shift in myself, I think I am bobbing at the surface, getting glimpses of air. Not because I’m “better”, but because I’m learning how massive this grief is and starting to learn how to navigate it and how to hold it. The first few months were filled with drowning and swallowing trauma that hit me like a freight train. 18 months worth of living through Jason’s cancer, but not processing, all that came crashing in, just like the world around me, when Jason died. Anger that consumed so much of my very limited energy. A lot of anger, a lot of hate. I have been working so hard internally. In other ways I am being forced to protect myself and my fragile heart, finally strong enough to say enough is enough. I am learning what it means to let anger move through. I making really hard decisions to protect myself and my peace. I am unapologetically doing what I need, which seems so simple, but in this world is actually really hard to do. I’m focused on letting the bad, the evil, move through, to make space for the love I carry for Jason. A space that is safe and made to carry this love and this grief, together. That doesn’t mean I am fine, but I have made progress. Progress that I am proud of. Progress looks like just simply missing and loving Jason, every damn day. The inner work that it’s taken to get here is draining. Grief is draining. I don’t think I was ever prepared for how physically and emotionally draining grief is.
I wasn’t prepared for how much it would take from my daily routines. How suddenly things I loved and enjoyed doing before would feel so different. These are things that were not even necessarily things I even did with Jason, but they were my routine when he was around. I keep reminding myself that listening to my body is exactly what I need. But it’s a weird feeling when your mind and body were used to running off of adrenaline for 18 months. My therapist reminds me that it’s ok to just lay in bed some days. I try to do that. For me it’s been such a balance of staying busy enough, because when it’s too quiet and too lonely, my mind races. Which is part of the reason I turned to writing.
It is weird how “normal” some days can feel. For the most part when I’m staying busy working, I am distracted and I fall back, just enough, into the pattern and life I lived when Jason was still here. Before he was sick, it wasn’t normal for him to be home during the day. The house was quiet, it was just me and Nora. But that pattern is not what life was for 9+ months before he died. Usually I’m quickly brought back to my new “normal”, when I check my phone and there is nothing from him during the day. When I’m prepping to leave the job site and I’m not calling him on the way home. Some days I’m just mad at how adapt our bodies are. That mine, slowly with time, is forcefully getting used to being without Jason. That doesn’t mean it’s easy, or that it’s ok. I have to remind myself, just because my body is working to rebalance after so much trauma and pain, it doesn’t mean I am forgetting Jason. But sometimes that’s how cruel time feels, every day, is a day further away from Jason’s presence, life, here with me. Some days my mind can’t even remember certain moments, features, what it felt like when he was here. It’s so weird. I hate it. I would give anything to experience him in the room next to me, to feel his hug, touch, kiss. To hear his voice, look into his eyes, to remind myself of a version of life that somehow feels so so far away.
Grief looks like living. It feels so evil and it feels so cruel to allow myself happiness when the single person I want most in this world isn’t here to live it with me. I try to speak the words out loud that Jason said over and over to me, and to others. “I just want Lauren to be ok”. I have to remind myself of this often. Jason cared most in this world about me, about me being ok, and about me being happy. Even when it is damn hard, the best way to honor that, is to keep living. I wrestle so much internally with the fact that living, breathing, accepting moments of happiness, isn’t forgetting Jason. Often it feels like it is. At the end of the day, Jason just wanted me to be OK. That’s my motivation to keep living, to keep moving forward, to figure out what this all means without him. I hope eventually, even though there’s so much more work to be done, and there will never not be work to be done, My heart can find a way to allow it to let happiness in, even if just for a second.
It is a terrifying thing to not know what’s next or where I am going or what I want to do. Someone recently said to me, you have lots of time to figure that out. Another person told me you’re young and have your whole life ahead of you. Yeah I am aware. That’s the problem... I am young. There is so much time. There are days when this loss, total derailment of my entire life, feels like it has erased 4 years of progress, plans, dreams. It puts me nowhere I want to be. AND my person, the love of my life, the person I planned on for forever, is DEAD. My whole life, my plans, included Jason. This shouldn’t happen. That’s where I think this grief, being a young widow, is so far different than anything most any other loss can compare to. People already have told me “you’ll find love again”, as if that’s the route issue of what I am feeling, mourning, missing. That mindset is so far missing the point of this unimaginable loss. When someone’s parent or sibling, an older spouse, dies we don’t as society tell them to replace the person they lost. We don’t tell them that they have their whole lives ahead of them and it’ll get better because they still have the option to find something different. We simply don’t say that. So why are we saying those things to young widows? I don’t believe in comparing loss, grief, especially when I cannot relate to another type of loss. But loss at this age, and in this season of life, of a spouse is so so grand. So grand that I truly believe the world doesn’t even know how to handle it. So imagine being expected as a young widow to handle it. It’s terrifying. It makes no sense. The only thing I know now about my life is that I get up everyday and I go to do my job. I’ve been slowly working my way back to full time. I take Nora on a walk. 3x a day. But aside from that, I don’t know where I’m going, I don’t know what I’m doing. Let alone, where I want to go from here. Because all the plans and dreams that I had with Jason, died with him. Deviating from those, even though he’s gone, is devastating, it’s not what I want. I don’t want to think about a future without Jason. Life without him is not the plan I had for my life.
At the crux of it all, at the end of every single day, I fall asleep missing and longing for my husband, Jason, along with the life we had planned and the version of me that died with him.
