Thirteen Months

It has been a while since I’ve sat down to write. Most my writing these days has been done on the fly or in bits and pieces of me trying to make sense of all the thoughts that are rushing through my head. Thirteen months. I get the sense that people assume I should be better or healed or moving on or done with this all by now. I don’t know why I get that sense, but I do. Probably because people keep moving on with their lives and I don’t get to / feel that I am doing that with mine. I don’t get to pick back up in where I was the day after Jason died and revisit something familiar or carry on the plans that were made. Me, I started back at zero and I often feel like I am still there. I think loss of a spouse is truly the main loss where you really are rebuilding everything. Where every logistical and practical thing changes. Nothing stays the same.

I want people to understand, 398 days later and it isn’t better. It is different. I sat in my bed and cried yesterday. Another Friday where I ache for Jason and so badly wish he was here. I said to my mom I just want my old life back. And of course, I want Jason here. I’ve stopped hearing from certain people which bothers me on its own. Then on the flip side of that, I continue to hear from people who I have tried so hard to set boundaries with, who can’t seem to respect my space. I don’t want to hear from people and I do want to hear from people, that seems to be the dichotomy of grief.

My heart is still waiting for this to change. For Jason to come back. Even though my mind understands that finality of death, or at least in theory it does, in execution it is still fighting it. It still wishes for something different. If I could re-write this story I would, 1000 times over. I would change every version of the way this ended. I would give anything for this to be different. I bargain still with the world, but the world doesn’t care. Death doesn’t care. Cancer didn’t care. It is final. And I get no say. I wish I understood, I guess. Though I am not sure understanding would bring me any benefit, not if it doesn’t bring change. Which it won’t. Grief is painful and confusing. I am constantly torn between the desire to try to keep living so big, so bold and wishing this was not my life, over and over and wishing I could change it all. I am not sure that tension will ever go away. I feel both sad and eye openingly thankful for life at the same. Thankful to know a love like the love I shared with Jason, yet that makes it all the more heartbreaking, and it still does not make any of this ok. A pain in knowing this is my reality paired with the desire to live so boldly, knowing life can change at any minute.

I feel often like I am stumbling through the days, just trying to find my way. Someone who once had everything that felt so structured. There was the plan. The plan was to get married, build a life, build a family, be happy. Then this happened. In the middle of that all. It stripped me of all of that. My plan was shattered. The key component of my plan, Jason, the other half of my world, was taken from me. It has left me thinking, what the fuck am I supposed to do now? Because even if I “keep living”, which I’d like to say most days I am trying to do, my person still isn’t here. Life showed me how good it could be to have him by my side and then just took it from me? Make it make sense. Why me? Why him? Why the people I have met through this shared pain?
Why does this happen to anyone?
Common questions I ask myself constantly. I continue to fight with the world, because this is so utterly broken and the brokenness didn’t end when Jason died, it only began. The days pass and the losses continue. They sneak their way into every little crack of my being and over time have only started to reveal themselves fully. The change of seasons, again. The beginning of football season, again. Our wedding anniversary, again. His upcoming birthday, again. I lose him all over, again. Ski season will roll around and there will be a time when I put my skis on for the first time since Jason died and I will lose him all over again. Just like I do, every day, in the simple moments and things that made up the way we built our life together.

I watch the people I love continue to build their lives and I am, for lack of a better word, jealous. Jealous that people get to keep living. Jealous at the families they get to build. Jealous at the normality of it all. People have said, well you get to keep living. I do, yeah. Physically. But do I? I was talking with a group of my widow friends and gosh I am thankful to have met these people. We all say the same thing, how isolating this is and how good it is to talk to people who understand. Who can make dark jokes and have deep powerful conversations all on the same call. But we were talking about how some of us wanted (and want) families. How that was our “next”. How do we get there now? We are starting over. My one friend was mentioning her desire to buy a house and her dad’s reluctant thoughts about that. I said that I fully understood her desire to want to control something, to want to keep moving life forward in anyway we can. Because when our people died, so did our futures. The futures we had planned and had built our life around. The next steps in this life is where all those around us are and yet here we are standing in a room of people moving forward with their futures as planned while we hold the broken pieces of a loss so big, that we simply can’t even wrap our minds around it most days.

It isn’t fair, I can tell you that much. Saying it isn’t fair over and over no longer feels adequate for what these losses really are. It is beyond unfair. It is horrific and tragic and painful and yet the world keeps going. Time passes. The world assumes that you will be better by the turn of the calendar. It has been a year now, so you must be through the worst of it. I’m not really sure what the worst of this could be. I know now it wasn’t necessarily the day Jason left this earth, though that was traumatizing, painful, soul crushing. No, I think it’s learning to live in a world that no longer holds that person or the life you once knew. Knowing you can no longer go back. Knowing you will never go back. Maybe it’s the days when nothing happens at all, and all you want is to sit in that calmness with your best friend. Maybe it’s the moments when the day is simple, beautiful, and all you’d give is to share it with your best friend. The sky turns pink at the end of the night and you’d give anything to look over and share this moment with them. Nothing but a fairly ordinary day. I’m not sure it lives in the big moments, but rather the small ones. The ones where joy is present. Because how can life just keep going like this and they don’t get to be apart of it? How can the days keep moving when my world felt like it stopped the day he left his world. But the worst? Maybe it is waking up every day without the person you planned your entire life with. The person who knew you in a way no else did. The way you’d wake up next to them and everything in the world felt right. And if that’s the worst of it, then I guess that is every day moving forward. Because each and every day does start over. And each and every day, my perfect person is still dead.