I take a shower hoping it will help but after the hot steam turns off and I pull back the curtain it is still there… this lonely, sad day ahead. Still the same me with no interests and desires fighting off that pull from pain that wants to keep me in the past. So in effort to not think, I crawl back into bed. Too exhausted from fighting memories to do anything productive. Guilt piling up beside the laundry and chores and decisions I have to make. Bed rot pulls me further in but also lets me lose myself in sleep or movies for a few hours at a time until something requires my attention. I handle those things only I can do then head back to my bedroom knowing the longer I stay like this the harder the rumination is to break
I don’t feel like I actively practice this mental rumination but as more time has passed and the more I have confronted my honest feelings in writing, there it is. Fitting me like a pair of warm, cozy socks. I live in damage control mode. Stuck in an infinite loop. I live in the defined defensive panic approach like “putting out fires”, or shutting down or even impulsive communication.
SL and I made it a year. A year without her dad and a year without my mate. A left shoe without the right. Is this a remarkable milestone? I don’t know because it honestly does not feel any different than day one. Ground zero. The end of life as we once knew it. Maybe though, it is, in a way, a morbid achievement of sorts. Proof that we held on. Proof that while I gave in to darkness many, many times, at the end, I still fought for breath. I fought through the cold, lonely nights to see another sunrise…alone. But to be fair, January 2 feels no different than March 2nd or May 2nd, or November 2nd and all the other things that passed by without him. The world didn’t stop spinning. Life didn’t slow down. But I did. I continue to stand still with only my continued agonizing existence to show for it. Can I point to any real progress other than I am still here? Is that enough? I still breakdown. I still find it extremely unbearable to make any decisions major or minor. What to have for dinner is even worse with one person and some days it feels like the greatest of Sisyphian tasks.
Surely, I should have made more progress. Surely, I should not be fearful of being alone for 11 days when my daughter goes to England to visit her fiancee. Surely I could have been able to start the kitchen renovations by now instead of being continually overwhelmed at the smallest things and finding myself fleeing to the safety and solace of medication that makes me sleep for hours. The sweet bliss of shutting down and not thinking until “tomorrow”. And then tomorrow turns into another tomorrow and so on and so forth.
There are people in my life that hesitantly, compassionately, gently, have said to me “David wouldn’t want this for you or David would want you to…” I hear it with the love with which it is spoken and knowing it comes from a place of concern and longing to be able to help…but it doesn’t help. We discussed everything. David and I. Every. Thing. He didn’t leave me instructions on how to keep going. He didn’t know how difficult it would be. He doesn’t have to experience this part. The after him part. His greatest challenge was on the front side… letting go. Knowing when to accept the situation. He was always good at acceptance. Me? Not so much. I don’t feel I will ever master that concept where his ending is concerned. His not being here. Because why else would it still feel as if he could walk in the door at any time and when I allow my thoughts to go that far, I am completely devastated again to realize he isn’t coming back. That happens at times throughout the weeks. In truest grief form, like that heavy stone rolling right back down the hill again. He is gone. He is not coming back. The portrait I have of him hanging on the wall that I talk to so many times a day is tangible proof he was here at one time but it doesn’t talk back. I have two choices in these moments. Keep going down that rocky steep slope of acceptance or take three steps back to the safety of not thinking at all. Finding something to distract me from thinking. Anything at all. These times, they somehow always show up when I have made plans to be productive. To be social. To attend a wedding. To just go watch TV with friends. To do the things I need to do on my end to pull the trigger on the floor renovations. Or to just enjoy being alone in a quiet house. But I cannot. I still do not know how to be alone and be relaxed. I grow anxious and bored and I pace without being able to accomplish anything. Hours have turned into days which have quickly turned into months and now a whole year has passed with me taking tentative steps forward and then backtracking at double the steps backwards. I don’t know if any of this makes sense to someone that hasn’t experienced a loss in this way. No one’s loss is the same because no one’s relationship is the same. Moms, dads, siblings, partners, friends, and any others. None are the same. People can feel empathy. People can feel similar. But no one can write that book of instructions.