Nine Months.

May 18th, 2026. Nine months and one day now without Jason on this earth. I continue to have a lot on my mind, but finding the energy to put it all down in completion has been hard. I’ve been trying to focus my time on other things, such as working on Jason’s cutting boards in his workshop, which has brought some nice purpose to me. Leading up to 8 months, last month, and then week+ following April 17th were very hard days for me. After a few weeks of feeling very low the days felt lighter and things felt ok. Which is often a confusing feeling on its own. Nothing more or less than ok, just ok. Here, surviving, living, but ok. The days leading up to 9 months were not as heavy as 8 months. But yesterday felt drab all together. I miss Jason every day. Every day is hard and there is not a second I don’t long for my life with him. But some days, like today, my energy is low and I am where I am because it’s all the energy I have to give. I think I have been working really hard to work through a lot of anger and other sources of pain outside Jason’s death, but all things so elevated with losing him. Some days, I simply don’t have the energy to be angry at it anymore. Other days it consumes me. But in both cases, I believe I am moving it through. I think this type of anger is something I will be able to move through, and hopefully and eventually heal from, in time, with a lot of work. It is very different than the death of Jason, which I never will “be over”. But they are all so intertwined. I am trusting that grief changes, because each and every single day, it is different.

This month I find myself really looking for Jason’s protection. Missing the ability to talk to him about life decisions, especially as it relates to protecting my own heart. I explained this to my therapist and she gets it. She helps me to move through it, try to find ways to encourage me to feel him here with me. I explained this same feeling to a friend and they said “you don’t need Jason’s validation.” I guess I am just coming to realize, most people simply don’t understand this grief and what I am dealing with at all. Maybe this person understands narcissistic family behavior, but she doesn’t understand it as it relates to the death of her husband, all at 31 years old. For one, I know I don’t “need” Jason’s validation. For 2, he’s dead so he sure isn’t going to give it to me whether I need it or not. The point is not necessarily needing Jason’s validation, it’s longing for the life we used to live when it came to facing hard things, together. He was my protector of these things, the ugly of the ugly when it came to his entire family. Which runs deep and it is multileveled. I never realized until he was dead that he was not keeping me out of communication with them because he didn’t want them to know me, he was keeping me with as limited communication with them because he didn’t want me to know them. He protected me all the time. He dealt with them his whole life, he told me from the second we met who they all were, and he spent our entire relationship trying to protect me from the versions of them that he knew and witnessed through his childhood. It wasn’t when he was hurt that he drew a line, it was when I was hurting that he said enough is enough. So no, I don’t “need” his validation of cutting them out, I need my husband back, to live the life we had planned so that life can be fucking normal. So that we can keep making decisions around our future, together.

I will be attending a wedding next weekend and truthfully it fills me with dread. It sounds horrible. I am asking myself now why I decided to go. There are so many layers. But simply, it is just another reminder that everything I ever hoped and wanted is gone, stripped from me, and everyone else? Well they just get to keep living with nothing getting in the way of their plans. And that pisses me off. It is so utterly unfair. Every single day, all of this is so unfair.

I am worn down. I am tired of this being my life. I am tired of having a dead husband. Yet, here I am, every single day is another day of a life that I am not interested in. From here, I only get further and further away from what once was and everything I ever wanted. I believe that life will continue to give. But what that looks like remains unknown. I am trying to find joy in whatever way I can. But it still hurts. I still have no idea what the future holds. But I know this, it still won’t be what I planned. And no matter how good it can get, this will still hurt. It will always hurt. Because Jason was supposed to be my forever. And some days I am tired of people acting like this is something that just goes away and disappears and that you move on and it doesn’t sting in your chest. Once a widow, always a widow. No matter what happens. No matter what I am doing, appearing as, laughing at, there is a part inside me that feels empty, every single day. I long for my person to be here doing life with me, in the quiet and simple moments most of all. I am just really tired of Jason being dead.