Seven Months. Part 1. Lonely
7 months without Jason is now only 4 days away. I am not even sure where my mind wants to start. The month has been full of what feels like progress in processing but also a lot of pain, a lot of sadness. Missing Jason. It is another Friday afternoon, the day winds down and it is quiet and it is hard. It’s lonely. More than anything, I’m sad and I’m lonely. Jason was my world, but I was his world too. It’s hard to go from being someone’s first thought, first wake up kiss, text or call in the middle of the work day, to silence. Not only is it silence, like he still exists in the world, just isn’t talking to me, he’s dead. It’s silent because he’s dead, and that’s the worst damn part.
A few things on my mind.
Loneliness, Connection, Relationships. Feeling isolated and really distant and disconnected from my peers and others.
Anger and the weight of words. Words that haunt me. Including both Jason’s parents telling him and me that this was his “choice”. Emotional pain associated with Jason’s family blaming him for getting cancer, dying of cancer. Genetic testing. The “we are above this, this won’t happen to us, because this was Jason’s fault it happened to him, but it won’t happen to us”, attitude.
Forced choice. The fear of choice. Choosing “what’s next”, even when none of this is my choice.
Boundaries and Blocking. The real version of Jason’s family. Letting go of a version of life that doesn’t exist, never existed, and protecting my heart. Accepting not everyone is meant to stay in my life through this type of grief.
Our plans of starting a family. IVF. Jason’s sperm. Legalities and new discoveries.
The concept of grief and joy coexisting far before Jason died.
Continuing to share Jason’s cancer story, our story. Discovering Jason’s cancer 6 months before our wedding.
Change.
Today I will start with Lonely.
This is so utterly lonely. It is lonely in the physical way that I spent since Nov of 2021 getting to know Jason, having his physical being there. He was only a call or text away and eventually would be here with me almost all the time. He was my roommate as much as he was my partner. Boyfriend, fiancé, husband. He was here, physically. He was the person I would hug and kiss goodbye when he left for work and greet in the same way when he would walk back in the door after a workday. The person whose hand I would hold in bed or on the couch when watching a movie or TV show together. The person in this world that I felt both physically and emotionally closest to. The person I shared everything with. I dream about being close to Jason again, and I wake up and physically ache for his presence. We shared a level of passion, love, intimacy, that I will never share with anyone else. As it should be with your husband. I miss the way he’d touch my back when I was in the kitchen cooking, or come into my office and rub my shoulders when I was wrapping up work for the day. I miss the long hugs, just because, where I would burry my face into his chest and he would kiss the top of my head and tell me that he loves me. What we had was so beautiful. So perfect. So many things (mostly cancer, F*ck cancer) robbed us of certain simple moments of all that before Jason died. But we clung to what we could. But now it’s all gone. No one is holding me the way he did, when I am physically aching for it most. My love with Jason was everything I prayed for, waited for in this life to find. I will never stop being angry that God took it from me. From him.
There is the other side of lonely, which is emotional. I think there are two layers to this emotional loneliness.
Missing Jasons presence in an emotional way, similar to what I laid out above in a physical sense. It’s no longer being someone’s person, their world. I was Jason’s focus, Jason’s person. The person he was thinking of randomly at work on a Tuesday during the day. The person he would text or call at lunch to just hear my voice and know how the day was going. I found this post on instagram that perfectly describes this feeling “To go from being someone’s intimately known and now, to be profoundly unseen is a part of grief that rarely gets named.” I think this type of lonely, pain, only can exist in partner loss. The relationship we share with our chosen partner are the only relationships that offer this type of knowing. It makes up our knowing, our safe space in the world. No one else around me see’s me like Jason saw me. Not having him here to see me, is really hard and really lonely.
Then there is lonely in the way I feel isolated, removed, different, than my peers. The experiences people my age are experiencing are their lives just beginning. Joy, lots of it. Me, I feel like my life has ended in a way. At least the life I knew, dreamed of and planned. It is hard to be around that type of joy for a few reasons, the obvious in that it hurts. It hurts when that is joy is so far from my reality and I don’t ever know if I will reach that type of joy again. We had that joy. We were supposed to have more of it. Then cancer came in like a wrecking ball and stole it. Stole a lot of joy. But it isn’t just joy, it’s the normality, the mundane, the small talk. The how is work going conversations when in the way my mind races every day feel so utterly small. There are some days when I can fake normal. There are other days when faking normal is too much of an ask. People are making plans, taking about their vacations, me, what did I do last month? Oh yeah, I finally picked out and designed my Husbands headstone. Not the same. Grief. The loss of my husband, at 31, has pushed me into this category where I almost feel I cannot relate to my peers anymore. I think there was a point in Jason’s cancer journey where I was already feeling that way. We’d get together with friends and the lives we were living were so different. Friends were off traveling, there were problems at work. But me and Jason. We were trying to get treatment to save his life. We were fighting long term disability, navigating social security, in and out of the doctor’s offices. Because cancer takes. Cancer takes everything, even if you are lucky enough to survive it, which Jason was not. I love my friends who have continued to show up, but sometimes it is really hard, I feel so isolated in the life I am living. I am clawing to find other people out there who have similar experiences, because the time I feel the most seen, isn’t when I am invited to a big gathering, it’s when I can sit in a small setting with someone who will listen, someone who can relate, someone who asks questions. Hard questions, big questions. Because they are all there is my mind anyways, but if I were to bring it up to the wrong crowd, they’d all just sit there like deer in the headlights. So instead, I read the room, and I filter what I am saying, simply because it has become too exhausting to meet others in their uncomfortableness. So most times, I end up saying very little at all.
At the end of this week I will travel to a retreat to meet 19 other young widows. I am hopeful for what this retreat will bring. If anything, I hope it brings connection, a space to feel less alone, to be seen be and see others who are living a similar version of this tragedy.
