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.