Go west old woman

This is a repost from my Facebook page, with a little extra info since it's been two days since I posted it.

I moved to Tennessee because Thing One wanted to move here to pursue his dream of being a songwriter. After we split up, I stayed because I didn’t want to move Andrew away from his father. Even after Thing One got remarried and moved to Missouri, I stayed here because I didn’t want to move Andrew further away from Thing One than he already was. And then I got involved in the local theatre scene, found my people, and met Doug. Though Tennessee has never really felt like home to me, I managed to build a fulfilling (and while Doug was alive, a blissfully happy) life here.

That life ended 457 days ago. 

I spent the first 28 years of my life in New Jersey (literally: I moved to Nashville on my 28th birthday). As of July 1, I’ll have spent the past 27 years in Tennessee. I think that’s enough. I cannot start a new life in the place where my old one crashed and burned. And the truth is that I hate damn near everything about this state: the heat, the humidity, the tornadoes, the distance from the ocean, and yes: the backwards politics. I love my people, but I hate my “life” (in quotes because it’s not much of a life).

I have an opportunity that may never come again: real estate values in Middle Tennessee are skyrocketing, and I bought this house when prices were super low. Sure, I could remodel this house and make it exactly what I want it to be for less than I would spend living somewhere else… but it would still be here. And here is a problem.

Doug and I were toying with a move out of the country, but I’m not prepared to do that on my own. We talked about buying a place in Kauai, and I gave that serious consideration, but it’s not affordable. I mean, I could buy a place inland, but it’s too damn hot to live there unless I’m living within spitting distance of the beach. And traveling back to the mainland to visit would be prohibitively expensive. 

I want to live in a place where it’s not brutally hot almost all the time from May to October. I want to live in a place where weed is legal. I want to live in a place where physician-assisted suicide is legal (because I am NOT going to linger in agony if I develop a terminal illness). I want to live in a place where I can drive to the ocean any day I want. I want to live in a place where the state and local legislators are not batshit crazy culture warriors hellbent on passing legislation that discriminates against marginalized people while ignoring the very real problems their constituents face. And I want to live in a place where I can go back to Hawaii every few years without breaking the bank in airfare.

After looking at all the options, I’ve decided to move to the Pacific Northwest (most likely Oregon, and most likely the Portland area). I made this decision about a month ago, but didn’t want to say anything until I’d talked to a realtor to see if what I’m looking for (in terms of location and price) is something I can afford. It turns out that I can.

There’s a lot that has to happen before I can move: I have to Marie Kondo THE FUCK out of this house (the house, I can handle; the garage I’ll need help with, because spiders). I have repairs that need to be made inside and out (and oh, I’ll be asking for recommendations). I need to have professionals come in and deep clean (after I get rid of all the stuff I don’t want to take with me). I need to paint (inside and out). I need to repair the apron of my driveway (it’s in terrible shape). I need a new mailbox. I have a shit ton of furniture I’ll need to sell (because the only stuff I’m taking with me are the things I absolutely love). 

Yes, my son is here, and I’m not gonna lie: leaving him is going to be really, really hard. But he has been incredibly supportive, just as I would be if he decided to move somewhere else. I’ll be thrilled if he ends up following me out there in a few years, but he’s a grown-ass man, and he gets to decide where his path will lead.

I don’t have any illusions that moving west will fix me, because there is no fixing me. I will forever be broken, with a gaping hole in my heart that was created when Doug died. I’m not thinking moving will be some kind of magic fix. But I need to build a new life; to do that, I need to be in a new place. And, for the first time in my life, I get to choose where I want to live. I get to choose where and how to write the next chapter of my life story. The best gift I can give to myself (and to Doug) is to live again. And I just can’t do that here.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Since I posted that to Facebook two days ago, I've put together a pseudo-project plan (too soon for timelines, but I'm the kind of person who needs a plan). I'd scheduled today and tomorrow off so I can get a head start on Phase I (basic decluttering) so I can bring in professionals to deep clean and then start on repairs: 15 months of neglect has taken its toll). For the first time since Doug died, I'm actually motivated (today I'd planned to tackle the kitchen, and I'm already nearly finished with that at 1PM).

Success and other sadness

It's funny, how one part of my life is going like gangbusters, and it makes every other part of my life seem even worse than it did when everything sucked.

Over the past month or six weeks or so, I'm back at work: competent, sharp, staying on top of my schedule and my deliverables, giving presentations and knocking them out of the park... and, much to my surprise, coding.

I've deployed two workflows to our production data governance software since I returned from my leave of absence after Doug died. And in both cases, every line of code was written under the guiding hand of our vendor's workflow expert.

But I've done plenty of debugging of my own over the past month, and this week - after deploying the second workflow last weekend - I began working on a new one, all by myself. And I'm making great progress. This is an enormous achievement: learning to code at 55 is not typical (yes, I can write SQL code; no, I don't view that as programming, even though technically it sorta kinda is).

And last weekend, I read a book: a friend's novel called The Witch (author: Fred Anderson; it's available on Kindle and it is absolutely terrifying and you should go buy it right now). For the first time in ages, I read a book!

I should be proud of myself for these meager accomplishments (that feel far more herculean than they really are), and I am. But it's hollow. The better I do at work, the emptier my real life feels in comparison. I'm used to having to cheer myself on; I'm used to giving myself a pat on the back for a job well done. But, for four years, four months, and four days, I had the best cheerleader in the world with me, and that was so much better. Yeah, I know I could call and brag to my son, or my sister, or any number of friends, and they'd be happy for me. But that's the thing: Doug wasn't happy for me; he was happy with me, because my success was our success. It may seem a fine distinction, but I promise you: it's bigger than it seems.

I take very little joy out of success that belongs only to me. I've been there and done that for many, many years. I loved sharing the good moments. I miss having a loving partner. I miss Doug.

I'm re-watching The Handmaid's Tale to refresh my memory before the next season starts, and I had to pause and cry like a crazy person when Emily stabbed Aunt Lydia and pushed her down the steps. Why, you ask? Because Doug LOVED Aunt Lydia, and for MONTHS after that episode aired, he kept saying he was going to be furious if they killed her off. I have to point out here that I don't mean Doug loved Ann Dowd (the actress who plays Aunt Lydia); I mean he had a thing for Aunt Lydia, the character. I won't even pretend to try to understand the weirdness of that, but it was a great source of amusement for us both. I cried because he's never going to find out what happens next; I cried because we would debrief after every episode, analyzing what happened and speculating on what would happen next. I cried because he doesn't get to do that anymore, and neither do I.

Where was I? Oh, yeah - somewhere, I can't recall now if it was Season 1 or Season 2, Fred Waterford says, "Every love story is a tragedy if you wait long enough." How very true, except that I didn't have to "wait" very long at all.

I'm lonely. So very, very lonely. Lonely for someone who wants to travel with me, and tell me the minutiae of his every day and hear the minutiae of mine, and sleep next to me, and wake up with me, and cook together, and run errands together, and build a life together.

The pain of missing Doug is still always there, and I imagine it will never go away. But hot on the heels of that pain is the pain of having SO MUCH LOVE to give, and no one to give it to and no one to return it.

In a way, this was all easier during those long months when I was still stupid. At least then, I didn't have anything to celebrate, and so I didn't feel the pain of having no one to celebrate with. But now, it punches me in the face every time I have a great work day. My success doesn't do a damn thing for anyone but me. Considering how fond we are of suggesting that no one is an island, it's astonishing how very wrong that is: I am an island, untethered from the rest of humanity. Oh, I can visit now and then, but my life is now mine alone.

Some people see that as something to celebrate; if only I were one of them.

Another birthday we can't celebrate together

Today, Doug would be 68 years old. But he isn't. He remains 66, and he'll always remain 66.

Because he's dead.

Today has hit me hard: two of his birthdays have now gone by since he died. Two birthdays on which I couldn't take him somewhere fancy, or cook him a special meal, or buy him three birthday cards, or wake him with a cup of coffee and a kiss.

I'm trying SO HARD. And most days, I manage to be productive(ish), and laugh a few times, and have conversations that don't revolve around the death of my person. But on days like today, I wonder if those days are possible only because those are days when I don't let myself think about what my life really is: empty, and lonely, and pointless. Those days are simply the days when I'm successful at lying to myself and convincing myself that I'm okay. Days like today are my actual reality: crying all day, wishing only to be with the only man who ever loved me; the only man I've ever loved.

A friend of ours posted this on Doug's Facebook timeline today. The text is from a Facebook post that Doug made right after we returned from our weddingmoon in Hawaii.

I realize that there are many people who never experience being loved like that. I realize I should be grateful for what we had, and I am. But it wasn't enough. Forty years wouldn't have been enough, that's true. But four years? That's just cruel. It's barbaric. We deserved so much more. I still have all this love inside me; what the hell am I supposed to do with it?

New (grief) math

I've written about grief math before. More than once, in fact. But the NEW grief math is considerably less unpleasant:

• 11 days ago, I received my first dose of the Moderna vaccine.
• 17 days from now, I'll receive my second dose.
• 31 days from now, I'll reach immunity.
• 32 days from now, I'll see two of my favorite people and hug them both. There will undoubtedly be crying.

Having this light at the end of the tunnel has made an enormous difference in my mood. I'm grateful that I'm finally reaching the end of one part of the horrible experience of the past 397 days. The other part... well, I don't think that will ever end.

I got through the 13 month milestone much better than I did the one year mark. But over the past few days, there have been the odd moments that hit me like a ton of bricks: walking Kellogg yesterday afternoon, I got a whiff of the cherry trees (maybe it was one of the others, but that's not the point), and was taken right back to that "I can't breathe" feeling from the early days. Doug was an avid gardener, and smelling flowers took me right back to that first summer after we started dating, when I "helped" in the garden; he always planted orange marigolds, because his mother liked them. Yes, that's a sweet memory; that doesn't mean it isn't also painful.

And then, just a few minutes ago, Kellogg insisted on another trip outside (I think he spotted a critter he wanted to play with), and there was this glorious sunset. And I burst into tears: See, sunrise was my time. But the sunset? That was ours. Every vacation, every long weekend, every nice evening we could, we'd watch the sunset together. We'd talk about our plans, we'd reminisce about our early days when we were struggling to figure out how to love each other best, we'd laugh about the silliest stuff... And sometimes, we'd just sit together, silently, holding hands and taking in the moment.

It's bittersweet, y'know? I mean, I've heard some widowed horror tales of marriages that I would've ended LONG before someone died. Yeah, go ahead and judge me for that, but there's no marriage if only one person is doing the work to keep it alive. So, Doug and I were lucky: we really had the fairy tale, except that it was real. And I know that's because we worked for it (and not actually a fairy tale), but it doesn't really matter: we made each other ridiculously happy.

Trips down memory lane are nice, but still triggering to some degree. But more and more, I'm getting the sweet with the bitter. And I'll take that.

I still haven't dreamed about Doug, but that's not surprising considering that my sleep has been totally jacked up since Daylight Saving Time kicked back into gear. I'm still getting 6-7 hours a night, but it's broken up; I don't think I'm getting the deep, restful sleep I need. So if I AM dreaming, I'm sure not remembering them. And I'm sure not feeling rested beyond the first couple of hours in the morning. I really hope that resolves itself soon, because I am one TIRED widow.

Despite not dreaming about him, though, I do feel Doug's presence more often. Not all the time, but there are moments. Is he really here in those moments, or is it just my imagination conjuring him up? I don't know, and I also don't really care: it's comforting, and that's enough.

Nights are forever

I ended up running over to the local hospital on Friday, and received my first dose of the Moderna vaccine. Yes, I had an appointment for this coming Tuesday at a health department one county over (which I've now cancelled), but the hospital was doing vaccinations first-come, first-served, and it was rainy on Friday, which I (correctly) thought would mean a short line. Finally, Friday was a significant day: it was one year to the day from when I went into lockdown. Between setting foot inside a hospital for the first time since Doug died, and realizing that I'm now six weeks away from being able to hug people again, and realizing that I can start to think about moving forward with the plans I've been making... it was very emotional.

Yesterday was a good day. Put on my most badass Spotify playlist at max volume, and got to work early. Made a lot of progress around the house (there's still lots more to do, but progress is progress). Received the new perfume I'd ordered: I can't wear my old Vera Wang perfume now, because I wore that for Doug, and wearing it is just too painful (it's amazing, isn't it, how scents can trigger emotions?). Made revisions to my 10-minute play (and I've even had thoughts on how I could expand it to a full, two-act play). Bought a ticket to go to the Picasso exhibit at the Frist two weeks after my second dose of the vaccine. Cooked a yummy dinner. Went to sleep at a reasonable hour.

...And woke up at 4:00 AM (which is, of course, 3:00 AM thanks to the lunacy of Daylight Saving Time): something (or some things) was creeping through my back yard. I'm guessing wildlife rather than human, because A) Kellogg wasn't at all concerned by it and B) I heard the coyotes yelling just a few minutes later.

In The Before, waking up in the middle of the night wasn't a big deal, because I usually woke up with Doug pressed up against my back and his arm around me - between his arm holding me close and his gentle snoring (or, on a funny night, his mumbling incoherently in his sleep), I would contentedly drift back off almost immediately.

It's these moments that are the hardest; they're when I feel most alone. The happily single don't know this particular feeling; the coupled don't know it. But those of us in this shitty club know it all too well. There's nothing like that feeling when the person you love most pulls you a little closer in their sleep. And there's nothing like the realization that it's entirely likely you'll never get to have that feeling again.

I can keep busy all day. I can talk to people, and dance around my living room, and sing power anthems while I do housework, and watch TV, and cook, and write. I can get through the days, and even convince myself that I'm okay.

But the nights? They're a different story. There's no distracting myself from the fact that I'm still sleeping on my sofa. There's no distracting myself from the fact that, in the middle of the night, I have no one to hold me and love me back to sleep. And there's no denying the fact that I'm but a tangential presence to everyone who loves me. I'm not saying they don't love me - I know I'm fortunate enough to be loved by a whole lot of people. But none of them holds me while I sleep. None of them relies on me every day to eat with them, do chores around the house with them, or simply be with them.

The big, splashy, romantic events were nice, but they're not what I miss about being happily coupled. No, it's the small things that I miss the most: bringing him a cup of coffee in the morning; cooking dinner and seeing his reaction when he really liked what I'd made; going grocery shopping together; watching a ball game together; waking up in the middle of the night and feeling his arms around me.

I can find ways to deal with absolutely everything but the loneliness, and the loneliness is the hardest part. And it's the one part I can't control, because I can't just magically whip up a partner out of the Void.

I'm not a Janet, after all

I tried to go back to sleep, but after an hour it became really clear that it wasn't happening. So I got the coffee going, and now here I am, alone with my pets and my thoughts, trying to figure out how to fix a problem that I have no power to fix.

So I'll finish my coffee and hop on the elliptical to burn off some of the anger that's creeping in. And then I'll cook breakfast and spend the day happily and busily distracting myself from the reality that will make itself apparent again tonight.

The loneliness is the hardest part. And I don't think there's any healing that.

All the news that's fit to share

I ended my last post by saying, "So I'm going to continue to do what I have to do to kill time until time finally takes mercy on me and returns the favor, or until a fucking miracle happens and I can actually live again."

Well, a fucking miracle happened.

I'm good. I'm really good. I'm still sad a good chunk of the time, yes. And I still wake up every day with a sigh and an, "Oh well; still here." But I don't think about killing myself every day. Honestly, I haven't thought about it much at all in nearly three weeks.

So, lemme 'splain:

The evening before I published my last post, I participated in a playwriting workshop; a friend of mine had put out a call for people interested in acting who'd never acted before, people interested in directing who'd never directed before, and people interesting in playwriting who'd never written a play before. Well, I like to write, but I've never written a play, so I signed up. I figured a little creative fiction would be a good distraction from, y'know, everything.

We had a zoom meeting on February 19, and he started us off with a writing prompt: Look many years into the future; someone is honoring you for something. Who is it, and what are they honoring you for?

Now, my initial response was, "Fuck you, Shawn! You know I don't want to think about many years from now - I don't even wanna think about tomorrow!" And I briefly toyed with the idea of nope-ing outta there. But I decided to give it a try. So I imagined my son making a speech at my 80th birthday, and talking about how proud he is of me for sticking it out even when I didn't want to, and building a new, happy life after my life with Doug was destroyed.

Several of us read what we'd written for the rest of the group, and it was brutal: I cried reading the whole damn thing, and several of the other writers were crying along with me.

The second prompt was: Write a letter to someone with whom you have an unresolved issue. Determined to take my tragedy and mine it for humor, my letter started with, "Dear Doug: FUCK YOU," and proceeded to unload my anger at him for making me fall in love with him and then leaving me.

The third prompt was to write a letter in response, from the point of view of the recipient of my letter.

At the end of the evening, we were instructed to use those two letters as the basis of a 10-minute play with those two "characters."

I wrote the first draft in one sitting on the evening of Monday, February 22. I'm not going to go into details, because the workshop is ongoing - but I'll post it here once we're done polishing and it's been performed via zoom. 

People, writing that little play was more therapeutic than all those therapy and grief counseling sessions combined. As soon as I wrote the last line of dialogue and then read the whole thing (crying the entire time, of course), it was as though an enormous weight lifted off of me; the darkness gave way to sunlight. For real, it was like flipping a switch from "broken, suicidal widow" to "still broken, but healing widow." I could breathe again; I felt wholly human again; I didn't (and still don't, and probably never will) feel like the old me; but I felt like a real, live person again, and not just a sentient meatbag of sadness and rage.

"But, Kathleen," I hear you cry, "WHY did you wait almost three weeks to tell us this? This is HUGE!" Well, you may remember that I previously wrote about doing better(ish), and that lasted all of about a week before all the sadness and rage came back (this time, with EXTRA rage!). Frankly, I didn't want to write about this latest emotional shift until I could say with some degree of certainty that it would stick.

It's been three weeks. It's definitely sticking. 

In the immediate aftermath of Doug's death, I somehow knew instinctively that (if I was going to heal at all) writing would be the way I would heal. I just got the details wrong. It wasn't the constant, cathartic writing of every emotion and thought that did it; it was creating a fictionalized version of my experience (in which I was able to get from Doug what I haven't been able to get in real life). But (apologies to Andy Dufresne), I had to crawl through a year-long river of shit to get to the point where I could create it.

I still have bad moments, and even bad days. And I won't lie: the bad moments are still horrendously bad. But the bad days aren't as bad as they were, and they're not every day. They aren't even the majority of days. I still miss Doug. I still miss him SO much more than I could ever explain in words. I will always miss him; I will always wish we'd had more than four short years together. And I'm still sad, a lot. But I'm also - FINALLY - able to remember some of our best times and feel some joyful nostalgia mixed with the sadness. What's more, I can now feel him with me almost all the time, and I really didn't think that would ever happen. It's progress, and I'll take it.

I've even started cleaning up the disaster that my house has become. No doubt, this is going to be a many-week affair (it took months to get it in this condition; there's no going from that to immaculate overnight). I'm still not sleeping in our bed, and it's clear to me at this point that I never will again, and that's okay. So, among the many plans I'm pondering once I'm fully vaccinated? Getting a new bed. And that's going to be really hard, and really painful. But it has to happen. Doug isn't in that bed, or in any of the rooms I plan to renovate to make this house be what I need it to be; he's in me, and in all the other people he loved who love him back.

Fresh on the heels of this newly-found healing, my vaccine phase came up, and so I'm scheduled for my first dose of the Covid-19 vaccine next week; by the end of April, I'll be able to start socializing again. And I'll be able to have Missy and her kids come by to see which of Doug's things they want for themselves, so I can start clearing out the things I don't need to keep. And, I'll be able to bring in a contractor to make this house into the house I want it to be. I'm genuinely looking forward to all of these things, and that's huge.

As bad as these first, long months have been due to the isolation caused by the pandemic, I think that - in a perverse way - that isolation helped me. I couldn't distract the grief away; I couldn't use socializing or hooking up with randos or frantically going out to do karaoke or... well, anything else to avoid dealing with it. The grief was there, all the time, and there was no choice but to face it. It was grief, concentrated and super powerful. If I'd been able to socialize as much as my friends and family (and I) would have wanted me to do, I don't know if I would have gotten here this soon. And it's pretty clear to me now that, if this didn't kill me (either via Broken Heart Syndrome or suicide), then I am absolutely unstoppable. I'm NOT unbreakable; I'm still broken, and to some degree I'm pretty sure I always will be. But there's beauty in those broken parts, and I am indeed far stronger than I ever realized.

I still don't know how to rebuild my life, exactly. I still don't know what the future holds. I hope that it holds the third (and please, gods, the LAST, and LONG-LIVED) great love of my life. I hope that it holds a home that represents who I am now. I hope it holds lots of travel, tattoos, great acting roles, time with my friends and my family, maybe a deeper dive into playwriting, and contentment. 

For the first time in a very, very long time, I hope.

And that is, indeed, a fucking miracle.

One year

Well, it's here. Doug didn't get to live to see what we thought would be the first of many wedding anniversaries even though he wanted to live. I'm stuck here living through the first anniversary of the day he died, even though I don't want to be alive.

After his first wife died, Theodore Roosevelt wrote this in his journal:

Same, Mr. President. Same.

Now, you could say that he went on and did great things with the remainder of his life, and that would be true. He was also 26 years old. And yes, it's different, even though you probably don't believe that.

It's been one year. Traditionally, one year marks the end of the official mourning period. In the modern era, it seems that the cultural expectation is that widow(er)s will be "recovered" far sooner than that. And over that year, I've watched others around me navigate the experience of grief with SO MUCH grace, and warmth, and hope, and kindness. 

I am not one of those people.

I am utterly broken. I knew it on Day One, but no one believed me. "It takes time!" "Be gentle with yourself!" "It's a journey!" I don't know what any of those things mean, really. Time does nothing but take me further away from the man I love and the happy, vibrant, competent, loving woman I used to be. Being gentle with myself? What the fuck even IS that? As for this being a journey, it hasn't been. It was an immediate, one-way trip straight to the depths of hell with no escape.

I work, badly. I take care of my animals, badly. I occasionally do script reads with friends - some of which I've done okay with, and others... not so much. But theatre - even virtual theatre - is really the only thing remotely resembling an outlet that I have, so I do it whenever anyone takes enough pity on me to ask me to participate.

My house looks like a crack house (minus the actual crack). I don't really bother putting anything away, and I can't remember the last time I did any cleaning beyond the litterboxes and the dishes, because why go to the trouble? I'm the only one who has to look at the piles of clothes, and empty boxes from stuff I've bought, and the dirty sink and toilet and shower, and the piles of dog and cat fur, and the dust. There are obscenities that I rage-painted all over the walls of my hallway (gems like "LIFE IS A FUCKING CURSE," and "KILL ME ALREADY," and "LOVE IS HELL"). Soon I'll run out of room and then I'll be painting in areas where it'll be visible to anyone looking through the front door or window. I don't care.

My sister asked me the other day why I don't just paint on canvas. At the time, I couldn't articulate an answer, but I have one now; two, actually. The first is that I'm making my external environment match my inner self: ugly, scarred, and obscene. The second is even darker: my rage - a constant in my life since that ill-fated trip to Georgia - is destructive. My hands are constantly bruised from hitting the walls or tables or my desk. I can't tell you how many things I've broken in fits of rage in the past few months. I destroy my house because it's a proxy for my real target: what I truly want is to destroy myself and end this misery. But I promised I wouldn't do that, so I destroy my house instead.

With every new death that I hear about, I rage more: these people want to live, dammit! They have lives worth living, and partners who will be lost without them, and it's not fair that they have to die and I have to survive just to suffer.

Aside from the rage, there's the loneliness, which never goes away. And it's not just Doug that I'm missing: I used to have people in my life who got me. They were comfortable talking to me about anything. They knew where I was coming from. They got my jokes, especially the dark ones. I don't have that anymore. NO ONE understands me. They say that they do, but they don't. I'm not angry or sad or upset about that - I get why no one understands me, but it doesn't change the fact that I am completely, totally, permanently alone, no matter how many times people tell me that I'm not.

And that's true even in the widowed community: most widows my age were married a long time, so they can't relate to my experience of losing my husband as a newlywed. Most newlywed widows are quite young and therefore statistically very likely to remarry, so they can't relate to my knowledge that the one brief taste of love I had with Doug is all I'll ever have. Even among "my people," I'm isolated.

No one gets me now. I AM alone.

A life without love simply isn't worth living. And yeah, I know: there are lots of kinds of love. But there's only one kind that doesn't require me to sleep alone every night, and that's the one I had and the one I want. No other kind of love comes close. 

I don't really talk at all to anybody other than colleagues at work (kinda impossible to avoid that), my son, very occasionally my sister, and fellow actors at script reads. And that's for everyone's protection, because at any given moment I'm merely a breath away from a blind, screaming rage, and I am NOT exaggerating; frankly, I'm surprised the neighbors haven't yet called the cops thinking I'm being murdered. I'm exhausted after every conversation because it takes so much energy to hold back the rage - and it doesn't always work (just ask the few people I DO still talk to). The truth is that I'm not fit company for the living, because I'm already dead. I'm hateful, and bitter, and resentful, and I have nothing in my emotional reserves to give to anyone. All I have is pain and rage; they're all-encompassing, and they leave no room for anything else. Hell, it would be a blessing to everyone in my life if I just dropped dead, because they could finally stop worrying about me.

I know that I'm letting everyone down, including Doug, and including me. I'm sorry. I know that Doug would hate me now. I hate me now. But this is who I am. It's not changing, no matter how hard I try.

And I HAVE tried, y'all. I swear, I really have tried. But nothing works. Nothing helps. A fleeting laugh does not a meaningful life make. A good script read does not give me anything approaching joy. There's nothing left to try. I'm a failure at putting my life back together. I've done it successfully, over and over and over again throughout my life, but not this time. There's nothing left in the tank; this was one heartbreak too many, and a heartbreak too big. There's no fixing this, and there's no making a life despite it, because the only life I can make still leaves me alone and longing for the one thing I can't have, and living is just not worth the trouble without that one thing.

It's been a year. And there has been not one day, not one experience, not one moment of the past year that I can look at and say, "THAT was worth sticking around for." I do what I have to do because I'm too chickenshit to do anything else, but make no mistake: time hasn't healed; not even a little. And I'm not living; not even a little. All I want is to stop hurting. But I haven't. And it's clear that I won't until my shitty, lonely, miserable excuse for a life ends. Something essential inside me broke when Doug died; I can't pick up the pieces because there are no pieces to pick up. That part of me isn't in pieces; it's gone. And there's no life without it, because that piece was my humanity.

Trying to look to the future doesn't help either. The other day I thought it would be lovely to go to the beach. That lasted all of a second before I remembered I'd be doing it without Doug, so what's the point? Even from a purely practical perspective, beach vacations are out, because I don't even fucking have someone to put sunblock on my back. REALLY think about that: something as simple as a trip to the beach is now off the table for me because I'll end up with sun poisoning because I'm alone. And what's the point of making memories when I have no one to share them with? What's the point of packing up shit to go away when there's nobody to share the packing, and the driving, and the experience? I am all alone. And there's absolutely no reason to think that will ever change.

I've lost more than five years of my life. A year since he died, yes. But more than five years gone with nothing to show for them but far too few pictures and this agony that's with me every waking minute. I say that because all those memories with Doug are... they're only mine now. And when I forget some little detail of an experience we had together, it's gone. Because he's not here to to help fill in those gaps in my memory. Other widow(er)s can take joy from their memories, but not this girl: each happy memory with Doug is like another rip in my soul, because all it does is taunt me with what was stolen from us.

It's been a year. I'm not exactly giving up, although it feels like useless effort. I try and I try and I try and I get nowhere. I'm too broken to find another partner - no sane man would want anything to do with me. And even if I weren't broken, the odds are so stacked against me that I'm probably likelier to catch Covid than I am to have someone to love again. And it's canon in the widowed community that the second year is worse than the first. MY GOD, how can I do another year WORSE than the one I just endured?

And life without that just isn't worth the trouble to me. It's too lonely. It's too empty. You may disagree, but I can assure you that the possibility of decades of celibacy and loneliness while I watch all the people around me, happy with their long marriages that I'll never have... well, I'd love to say I can be happy for others' happiness, but I've lost that too. It's not that I want anyone else to suffer (I don't), and I don't begrudge anyone else their happiness, but I can't take pleasure in their joy. And yeah, I know that speaks volumes about who I am now, and I know it's not good. I DON'T KNOW HOW MANY MORE WAYS I HAVE TO ARTICULATE HOW DOUG'S DEATH HAS RUINED ME BEFORE PEOPLE GET IT: I'm a horrible, hateful, miserable, bitter person now, forced into an existence that has zero joy and zero hope to get any. And despite what some people would say, nothing I do seems to change that.

Sometimes I think the only smart thing for me to do is sell this house, cut ties with everyone, and move someplace where I don't know anybody. Because even if I DO someday manage to heal to the point where I'm consistently functional, no one who's known me during this time will ever be able to look at me or relate to me normally again. And no one will be able to forget how wretched I've been to myself and everyone around me. I don't blame them for that; it's just reality.

I'm sorry that I'm not stronger. I'm sorry that the death of my love has changed me into someone hateful and someone he would have hated and whom I hate. I'm sorry that I can't do what so many other people have managed, but it's abundantly clear that I can't.

So I'm going to continue to do what I have to do to kill time until time finally takes mercy on me and returns the favor, or until a fucking miracle happens and I can actually live again. 

Not-an-update

I've been staring at this screen for half an hour, because I don't know where to start. I tried making a video post, because I was feeling too lazy to type. Unfortunately, when I reviewed the recording I realized that I couldn't keep my train of thought on the rails, so here we are. But, because I love you, here are a few stills from the recording. No reason for you to miss the glory that is me with a Pebbles Flintstone ponytail and no makeup, right? 

Yes, fellas, I'm single; the line forms to the left. Also, it should be noted that I spared you the "crazy eyes, pursed lips" Rudy Giuliani expression. You're welcome. 

Oh, on second thought, fuck it. Y'all deserve a laugh, so here ya go: I wasn't trying to mimic Rudy's famously insane expression, and yet here we are. The only thing I'm missing is a thin stream of brown hair dye (or, perhaps, motor oil?) leaking down the side of my face. 

But I really am gonna spare you still images of me crying; for one thing, the red eyes make me look stoned (which I am not), and the red nose makes me look as though I've been snorting cocaine (which I clearly have not, or I'd be much, much thinner and unable to sleep). Plus, I'm not particularly interested in being a purveyor of grief porn (also, don't google grief porn, because evidently Rule 34 is REAL, yo 😳).

I've been pretty much offline for... I don't know, man. A week? Two weeks? A decade? The days are kind of a blur, to be honest. I've fallen back into my old habit of living on coffee from the time I wake up until dinner most days, but managed to eat real food yesterday and had groceries delivered so I can eat real food for the next seven days. And yes, I can tell the difference: when I eat well, I swear my IQ jumps by a good 15-20 points.

I've been indulging in a lot of retail therapy, but I don't hate myself for it because for one thing I can afford it, and for another I'm mostly buying kitchen stuff. A few weeks ago, I bought an air fryer. which makes the best tofu ever. If you aren't a fan of tofu due to the texture, I'm here to tell you that air frying it is a game changer. 

I also bought a Vitamix, which was delivered yesterday. Yeah, there was a fair amount of sticker shock, but this thing will last forever. My old food processor is great for slicing up five pounds of onions to caramelize them, and for grating big quantities of cheese or chocolate, but disassembling the damn thing to clean it is a pain in the ass. I also needed a good blender for soups, and I'm gonna want to make breakfast fruit smoothies when the weather gets warmer, and my old blender will not tolerate frozen fruit (or effectively puree the handful of spinach I like to throw into my smoothies). I'm christening the Vitamix today to make hummus - and a silken tofu/chocolate mousse to have for dessert tomorrow. 

Cooking really is my only outlet, so I might as well give myself the gift of good tools, right? Next up will be a set of GOOD knives.

Cooking aside, I'm still stuck. And I mean really well and truly stuck. I don't want the life I have, I can't have the life I want, and I can't find my way out of that cycle. If it weren't for the fact that 2/3 of the closet space in this house still has Doug's stuff in it, I'd wonder if my life with him was just a dream. 

I'm lonely, but it's a loneliness that can't be helped by talking with friends or family, however nice that can be. So my only options are remain alone and lonely for the rest of my days, or find a man to share my life with. The former is unacceptable, because it gives me half a life; the latter is unacceptable, because it means taking on the risk of dating and opening myself up to love again. Risk is a big problem for me, given that I'm now a person who's afraid of literally everything but death. Two choices, neither of which is really a choice at all. I kinda feel like this guy, but I'm not so good at playing it for laughs.

So if anyone has suggestions as to how I can get out of this "don't want to live alone but too scared and fucked up to not live alone" cycle, I'm all ears. Or if you're a single, age-appropriate dude who's hankering to partner up with a woman who's a great cook but has new(ish) anger issues, go on ahead and slide into my DMs. 

Because if I don't find a way out of this, I'm going to keep getting more and more bitter and resentful and exhausted, and eventually I'll completely give up. Depending on the day, "giving up" may mean what you think it does, or it may just mean quitting my job, selling my house, and hitting the road until I run out of money and starve.

Still in the hole

Since the last time I posted, nothing has changed. I am back in the depths of the abyss, and there's no way out. I have exactly one problem: my husband is dead. And that one problem makes everything else unbearable. Yeah, I have friends and family who are wonderful, but it's too painful to hang out with them (virtually or otherwise) because most of them are happily coupled and I'm alone and I'm just not a good enough person that I can get past resenting that so many people have what was stolen from Doug and me. Yep, I have a great job, but I can't enjoy that because I'm still operating at MAYBE half capacity. Yep, I make good money and have lots of PTO so I could travel, but there's no joy in traveling alone when you had the best traveling partner in the world, and now he's gone forever.

My "life" has been reduced to work and sleep. That's pretty much it. I don't sleep because I'm tired, and I don't ever feel rested; I sleep because it's the only escape I have from the empty, lonely reality that's never going to change. And all the love in the world from my family and friends? I'm sorry, but it doesn't help. Because what I'm lonely for is something that can be provided by only one person, and he's dead.

So on work days, I work. And then I sleep. On the weekends, I sleep.

I don't know what got into my head those couple of weeks when I was thinking I could do this. I can't. I don't want to. If I could go back in time, I would've ended this the day after Doug died; at least I could've saved myself 338 days of misery.

But I didn't. And so I'm stuck here, just waiting it out, because there's nothing else to do since I'm too chickenshit to do what I want to do. The other day I posted that I'm back to wishing for death every day, and if I'm lucky, maybe one day soon my wish will come true. But I have 55.5 years of experience on this planet, and based on the luck I've had so far, I'm not liking my chances.

I'm not looking for advice. I'm not looking for people to tell me I'm loved. I know that I'm loved. It's just not enough. Not without him. I'm not looking for anything; I'm just telling you how it is.

Saw this in an ad on Facebook yesterday and cried for an hour solid. Because it's me.

So now you know how I'm doing. And I'm going to finish this coffee I'm drinking, turn off my phone so no one can interrupt me, and go back to sleep.

Back in the hole

I was SO hoping that I'd be able to write a positive post; hoping that I'd turned the corner - that I'd still have some bad days, but the worst days were behind me. And then, yesterday happened, and... I am JUST. SO. TIRED. 

In the past 322 days, my husband died. Then field mice invaded my attic days later. Then a tornado came within two blocks of my house and within a football field of my son's apartment, completely destroying the home of one friend and damaging the homes of several others. Then I had to lock down due to a pandemic (isolation that continues to this day, because selfish, science-illiterate covidiots refuse to take the necessary precautions that could have ended this months ago). Then I had to put down Doug's and my 19-year-old cat, Prowler. Then, social unrest due to numerous racially-motivated extrajudicial killings by police officers. Then, I went on a trip to try and heal, only to discover I was even more broken than I thought. Then, my son lost his work-from-home IT job, and is now working in a public-facing job (in our county, where the Covid test positivity rate is, as of today, a horrifying 28.5%), so I worry about him every day. Then, my ex-husband's sister died. ON my son's birthday. My son was very close to her; she was quite a bit older than Andrew's father, so she was almost like a grandmother to Andrew (which was a beautiful thing, given that both his grandmothers are long deceased). He, then, is grieving a second major loss in addition to losing his stepfather, which is just another reason for me to worry about him - it's what moms do. Then, an election that was fraught with drama and lies about voter fraud that didn't occur. Then, a Thanksgiving that wasn't. Then, a dear friend of Doug's and mine died. Then, a Christmas that wasn't, complete with a suicide bomber in Nashville. Then, a New Year's Eve that wasn't. And yesterday, an attempted coup, incited by a sitting POTUS. I have friends who have covid, and friends with family members who have covid. 

That's... 18 emotional punches in the space of less than a year, and that's counting the pandemic isolation as just one, and the numerous Covid diagnoses as just one. It's an average of one crisis every 17.9 days (yeah, I know: more grief math). 

It's no wonder I'm drowning: I have been in full on fight-or-flight mode pretty much nonstop since February 20, 2020. I can't catch a breath long enough to process anything, because every time I turn around it seems there's another crisis. I've slept a total of six hours in the past two nights. I am JUST. SO. TIRED.

I have been crying nearly all day today. I don't know how much more I can take. WHEN do I get to JUST grieve my husband? This isn't the frantic, desperate, panicked crying from a few months ago; this is more a quiet, deep despair that just won't budge.

I'll have lost my entire first year of grief to the pandemic - does that mean I have to live TWO YEARS of the first year? I didn't "get through" the first Thanksgiving, or Christmas, or New Year's Eve, because those holidays effectively didn't happen. Am I going to suffer the first year all over again? I don't think I can.

It's not that I'm feeling sorry for myself; I'm genuinely not. It's that I am JUST. SO. TIRED; profoundly exhausted. And it's not lack of sleep; it's the relentless march of disaster after disaster after disaster. It's the anticipatory terror of what in the fuck is going to happen next? Back in 2007, when I had pneumonia, I was so tired that I had to lie down to rest after taking a shower - before I could even dry off. This is like that, but without the hypoxia. Even the smallest task requires a herculean effort, and I just don't have it in me anymore.

I am tired down to my very soul. And so completely, utterly alone. 

I'm sorry, y'all. I was really hoping to write a positive post. But it appears that hope has again abandoned me.

I am JUST. SO. TIRED.

Cult of positivity

There is something that has been weighing on me for a couple of months, and I've tried to handle it with the occasional pointed comment or snarky aside, but that's just not getting the job done, so it's time for an angry rant (lots of profanity here, folks, so go ahead and clutch your pearls now and get it out of the way).

Round about October every year, I see people who are excited to see Christmas decorations come out early, and I see people who bitch about Christmas decorations being out "too early," and I see LOTS of  "awww, let people enjoy things!" posts.

But I almost never see "let people be sad" posts. No, instead I see all the armchair life coaches spewing their usual bullshit:

• "You just need to find the lesson in the experience..." Shut up.
• "It's all about your mindset!" Shut. Up.
• "Every cloud has a silver lining..." SHUT. THE FUCK. UP.

The relentless pressure to put a happy fucking spin on everything is NOT out of concern for those of us who are struggling; it's about people's unwillingness to deal with the discomfort of dealing with people who are in pain.

Listen, assholes: some things just fucking suck. How, exactly, am I to find a silver lining in the fact that my husband died, hmmm? How to find a "lesson" in the fact that, less than two months from now will be the first anniversary of his death? How to put a good "mindset" on the fact that I'll have to deal with that anniversary every fucking year that I live, when we never got to celebrate a single anniversary of our marriage?

And how can ANYONE who lost someone close during 2020 - the year when we couldn't even get the support that we needed due to a fucking pandemic - how can ANYONE in that position be ANYTHING but broken and lost and sad and angry? And now you're gonna make us feel worse than we already do because we can't find a way to be happy despite our lives being destroyed? Like there's something wrong with us for mourning what we've lost instead of being grateful for what we had? Here's a news flash for you: being grateful for what we had? THAT DOESN'T FUCKING TAKE AWAY THE SADNESS FOR WHAT WE LOST. Read that again. And again. And again and again and again if necessary, until you fucking understand it.

For fuck's sake, if you can't deal with people being sad/angry over the shit year that just transpired, maybe it's YOU who needs to take a fucking look in the mirror, count YOUR blessings that you aren't in our shoes, and then SHUT. THE FUCK. UP.

Let people feel how they feel. Maybe YOU oughtta cope with your unwillingness to face the reality that some things are just objectively awful and cannot be spun into fucking gold.

Maybe the power of positivity is effective for some situations, but when you're dealing with people whose lives were completely torn to shreds - whether through death, or illness, or losing their job or their home - it's not only ineffective, it's fucking insulting. It's an insinuation that losing the love of one's life is somehow emotionally equivalent to your car breaking down. 

I can't "positive think" my way out of the loneliness of missing my husband, because no amount of positive thinking is going to make him alive again. And no friendship can stem that loneliness, because it's loneliness for a kind of intimacy that can't be had any other way. 

Let people feel how they feel. Period.

The dark side of marriage/partnership

This post isn't about me or for me, and it's not about or for my fellow bereaved people; it's about and for those of you who are currently coupled up (whether happily or not). 

Imagine that you're happily married/coupled. Maybe you've been together a year, maybe you've been together 50 years. And your spouse dies, and you're destroyed. You're trying to get through the days, lost without your love, and then - while looking for life insurance documents or banking stuff that you need - you find a romantic card to your late spouse - but it didn't come from you. Or maybe you find a letter. Or an email. Or sexually explicit photos of your spouse with someone else. Or, even worse, the other person in that affair reaches out to you directly and tells you about it. Or shows up at the funeral and lays it on you there.

Suddenly, you're not just dealing with the emotional pain of losing your spouse, but you're also left wondering: What did I do wrong? Did s/he even love me at all? Was s/he planning to leave me? How could I have been so stupid that I didn't know? You're left with a million questions to which you can never get answers.

On top of that, you have anger that you cannot express to the person who hurt you most. It's one of the most seriously fucked up things I can think of.

The American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy said in 2018 that 35% of married women and 45% of married men have been unfaithful. This includes both full-blown affairs, one-nighters, "everything but the deed" relationships, and emotional affairs.

Now, if you're one of those statistics and you're cheating on your spouse (I'm gonna use "spouse," but everything I'm saying applies to spouses or unmarried partners), I'm not here to judge you; I don't know your life. My late husband was a mental health counselor, and he cleared up a lot of misconceptions I had about infidelity - specifically, there are many reasons why people cheat, and most of them are not because they don't love their spouses. So no judgement here. But, you need to understand that if your spouse finds out about this after you die, you will have made an already unbearable situation even worse, impossible though that seems. 

If you find out that your spouse is cheating on you while they're living, you have options: you can throw 'em out, file for divorce, scream every ugly thing you need to say, burn their clothes (I don't recommend it, but you can), clean out the joint bank account (again: not recommended). You can express your anger TO the person who caused it. Hell, you can talk about it, forgive, and build a stronger marriage, if that's what you want to do. But however you choose to handle it, you can make that person understand and feel the pain they've caused you.

There's no way to do any of that if the person who cheated on you is dead. So now you're mourning a person who betrayed your trust, and a marriage that you also now fear was a lie. Can you even imagine what that must be like?

For all the pain I'm in every day, that's one pain that was spared me: Doug was faithful, as was I. And yet I'm STILL so angry about my situation that I want to burn down the entire damn world; I can imagine the white-hot fury I'd feel if he'd been cheating on me.

Look, I get it: you think you won't get found out. And you're not planning to die. Well, I hate to break it to you, but LOTS of people die who think they're not going to die any time soon. Doug sure AF didn't think he was going to die. 

So, on behalf of your spouses, I am BEGGING you: If you had an affair in your past, and it's over, get rid of ALL the evidence, and I mean ALL of it. If you're having an affair right now - or even a flirtation that you don't think quite meets the criteria to be an affair - make a damn decision: either end it and recommit to your marriage, or end your marriage. But DO NOT just continue like you are. 

If you aren't in love with your spouse anymore, you can fix that (falling in love may be uncontrollable, but staying in love is a matter of choosing to do the work). But if you aren't in love, and you don't want to or truly believe you can't fix it, then fucking end the marriage, you coward. You're trying to have what you think is the best of all worlds: get the exciting affair and the security of the marriage, right? But it's NOT the best of all worlds, and I guarantee you: divorce will not be as painful to your spouse as finding out after your death that you'd been lying to him or her will be.

Even if your marriage is absolutely miserable, please: do not just carry on as you are. If you have even a shred of compassion for your spouse as a human being, please don't put them in the position of learning about your infidelity after your death.

Losing a spouse is awful beyond description - and that's true even if the marriage wasn't terrific. But losing a spouse and then learning that they were unfaithful to you? That's a cruelty that no one deserves to suffer.

You're going to die. You may very well die before your spouse. And if your death will leave them to discover something that will tarnish every happy memory you ever made together, and you won't take action to prevent that, well... I absolutely will judge you for that.