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.