It’s A Process…

So, the grief process is turning out to be a lot of ups and downs. In fact, it’s a lot like that Chris Farley video clip that’s been going around lately on Facebook, you know, where he rolls down a steep hill, stops, relaxes, takes a step, and then he’s rolling uncontrollably down a hill again until he catches hold of a bush, starts to pull himself up, and it comes out of the ground and yep, he’s rolling again.

Grief is a lot like that.

It’s an uncontrollable roll down a steep, rocky hill, and you finally slide to a stop and get up and think, “Okay, okay… I’m okay.” And you take two steps, and then ground falls out from under your feet and you’re rolling again, except this time, you slam into a tree. Or you get kicked in the head by a moose, or a bear stops your fall, all nice and furry and soft... but it’s still a fucking BEAR, and he ain’t happy with you for slamming into him.

I was doing okay for a while there. I was taking walks with my daughter, I was working in the yard, and repotting stuff on the porch, I was doing stuff in the house… and then it got hard to sleep at night again, and now, it’s almost impossible. I miss the Husbandly One so much, y’all have no idea.

I always told him it was next to impossible for me to sleep without him. Whenever he was away, I would pretty much stay awake all night, or maybe get two or three hours of sleep until he got home. There was something so… reassuring about him being there next to me, either my arm around him, or his around me. His solid presence pressed against my back. His warmth. The sound of his heartbeat under my ear.

There were many times over the last three years, since his diagnosis, where I would press my face into his back, inhaling his scent, feeling his warmth, and think, “I have to enjoy this while I can, because it will be gone before I’m ready.” I knew he was going to die, I hoped and prayed it would be a long time, but I knew it was coming.

I didn’t expect it to be so soon, though. None of us did. Even his oncologist was shocked. He fully expected THO to get at least ten more years, and I think he would have, if the chemo pills he had taken hadn’t torn up his stomach and esophagus and caused so much damage, he couldn’t take in enough nutrition to survive the rest of his chemo treatments. And that’s when I get mad. If only he hadn’t taken those pills. If only he’d listened to me when I pointed out that they were making him worse. If only I’d insisted he tell the doctor how sick they were making him.

If… if… if… if….

It doesn’t really do for me to hash it over in my mind, save to torture myself.

Sometimes, at night, I get so angry with him. I rage at him, yell at him, tell him what a stubborn asshole he was to refuse to go to the doctor for so fucking long. It kills me to remember that our gastroenterologist told me some spots had shown up on his liver, three spots that were barely a millimeter, and that he wanted THO to get it checked, to go to another specialist to see what was going on. But we had just lost our medical insurance that we were getting through the company THO worked for, so we put it off.

I let him talk me out of insisting he go.

I have so many regrets.

We were supposed to grow old together. Now, I’m just growing old… alone. And without my best friend.

It’s been two hundred days since the Husbandly One died. Two hundred days. Two hundred days since I felt him squeeze my hand three times to tell me he loved me. Two hundred days since my kids were able to sit with their father and hold his hands and talk with him.

Two. Hundred. Days.

And I have no idea where to go from here.

Advertisement

Normality is Relative….

Despite growing up with an alcoholic father, my childhood was relatively normal.

Yeah, I know, but seriously, it was. I mean, there were odd things like… how my mom never let us close our bedroom doors for any reason, not even changing clothes, unless we had guests in the house. Or how my dad always took the kitchen matches out of their boxes as soon as we got home from the store with them and put them in glass jars with the striker boards glued to the lids. Why did he do that? Because, according to my dad, mice chew on the match heads and start fires.

Huh?

Still, my parents were there for us, and my mom made all our clothes, and my dad taught me how to throw a punch and sew buttons on shirts and how to hem pants, and my parents and my sisters read books to me, and we sat and played dominos in the evenings, or Monopoly, or Go Fish, we sang songs, we enacted plays, we sat on the porch on rainy days, and we shrieked and ran for pots when the roof leaked. It wasn’t perfect, and there was bad stuff in there, but all in all… fairly normal. Whatever that means.

My daughter’s girlfriend, however, has grown up with a narcissistic parent. And there are a lot of things about the Impertinent Daughter’s girlfriend that drive me nuts, little things that I think, “How do you not know this?” because it’s something everyone should know, like… not putting a plate of food you couldn’t finish in the fridge uncovered. Great, I get it, you couldn’t finish it, you might want it later, so you put it in the fridge. But… why uncovered? We have foil. We have plastic wrap. We have paper towels. There are many options for covering the food, to maintain moisture levels and keep it from absorbing odors from other foods in the fridge… but she didn’t use them… until I explained to her why. Even now, she occasionally forgets, because it’s not a habit for her yet.

The other thing, and this is directly related to the narcissistic parent, is her need to obsessively and completely over-explain any action she takes… ad nauseum et ad infinitum until you end up snapping at her to stop. Whereupon she’ll then explain to you why she was explaining the first thing and what steps she took to explain it… you get the picture.

It’s seriously enough to make you want to spork your own eyeball out with a dirty fork.

Love her, but oy, she drives me nuts!

So tonight, after my daughter yet again exploded after GF explained that ID needed to finish the water in her water bottle, then told her she was putting it in the fridge for her even though there really wasn’t room for it to keep it nice and chilled for her, then told her that there was space for it, she was putting it in the door so she’d see it when she opened the fridge and that it was on the right, and under the green bottle on the shelf above it and that there was about half a bottle of water left in it, and she should really drink it tonight, so it didn’t go bad (water goes bad???) in the fridge… yeah, I’m betting y’all can see why she blew up.

GF was upset, of course, so after Miss Impertinent departed to take a shower, I sat GF down and said, “You know, I know you’re used to having to explain everything you do in exhaustive detail, but I want to tell you, with all the love in my heart that you don’t have to do that with us.”

“Oh, no,” she began, “it’s just that I want to be sure you completely understand why…”

“Honey,” I said, stopping her. “No. You don’t have to. Really. You see, the Impertinent Daughter, the Impossible Son, and I? We understand. We’re smart enough to pick up on the contextual clues and we can figure out why you do stuff, mainly because we’ve known you for eight years now, and we pretty much know how you tick. You don’t have to explain to us, because we know, okay? And if we don’t, or if we’re confused? We ask!“

Her mouth dropped open, her eyes widened, and she stared at me, then you could see the light go on. “OHHHHHHH!!!!”

I nodded. I waited. Then I said, “Your mom made you explain things in exhaustive detail, didn’t she?”

“OMG! Yes, she did!! How did you know????”

“Contextual clues,” I said, and waited again.

She sat down. “Over and over, she would just ask me to explain things over and over, everything I ever did, and then she’d make me do it again.”

“Yeah, it was a control thing,” I said. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry she turned you into the Exposition Elf.”

She frowned. “The… what?“

“The Exposition Elf.” I watched her then sighed. “I know you’ve watched Lord of the Rings with us, and I know you’ve read the books, right?”

“Right.”

“Okay, so… a lot of people watched the movies who never read the books. And let’s face it, there’s a lot of stuff in there that people wouldn’t get, because there aren’t enough contextual clues for them to understand, stuff that only people who’d read the books would understand. But if Peter Jackson had put in stuff to explain it, the movies would have been about 12 hours longer so… he made Legolas the Exposition Elf. Legolas gave us the oddly specific explanations that filled the rest of the folks who hadn’t read the books in on what was going on. Of course, we also had Gimli the Deposition Dwarf, but that wasn’t as frequent as Legolas’ Exposition Elf duties.”

She nodded, and I could see she understood what I was saying.

“Girl, you are our Exposition Elf,” I said with a smile. “The only thing is, we’ve read the book, so…”

“OHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!”

The light was dazzling!

“That’s perfect! I totally get it now!” she said with excitement. “And if I’m doing it again, you can just say…”

“Thank you, Legolas,” I said and laughed when she clapped her hands. “Or, that’s enough, Exposition Elf!”

“Yes!! Yes, that!”

I’m glad it worked!

Eighty Two Days…

I’m still here. I have good days and bad days. I’m not sleeping well. It’s hard to sleep without the Husbandly One in the bed. It’s funny when I remember how long it took me to get used to having him in the bed when we first married. But now?

It’s nearly impossible.

My primary doctor has prescribed a mild anti-anxiety medication to help me sleep at night. I’ve also decided to cut off all caffeine after 8 pm, just to see if that helps, too.

And I just got reminded that Valentine’s Day is coming, and… for the first time in thirty years… I’ll be alone on Valentine’s Day. And I just… don’t know how I’m going to deal with that.

I’m managing the bills, so far. I paid the property taxes. The next big hurdle is the income tax, and… making sure I get documentation of my income, such as it is, to the ACA people so I don’t lose my coverage. If the widow’s disability doesn’t come through, the local IRS office is hiring people to do data entry.

Two steps forward, three steps back. I’m gonna get through this. I think.

Forty Days…

I think what I hate the most about my new normal is… how unreal it all seems.

The worst moment? That moment of realization after first waking up in the morning, warm in the bed, and I start to roll over to see if he’s awake yet, how is he feeling… and then I remember. Oh. Right. He’s gone.

I hate that moment. I hate it so much. It’s… horrible. Because for a few nanoseconds, he’s still alive. For half a breath, he’s still there, lying next to me in the bed in his usual curl on his side… and then I remember that he died, and I’m alone in a bed that six months ago we were considering replacing with a queen sized and now… now this full sized bed is far too big.

“The bed’s too big without you…”

Yeah. It is.

It’s been forty days. Forty days since the Husbandly One took his last breath and I stood there with shock, waiting for him to take another one and… he didn’t. Forty days since it felt like someone was ripping my heart right out of my chest.

My friends tell me that I’m rocking this, that I’m doing so well, that I am doing a marvelous job coping. I don’t know how much of that is truth, and how much is wishful thinking.

How am I doing? Well… I’m not sleeping. At first, I was. I was sleeping better than I expected. I would drop into bed, exhausted, and I would cry my heart out and then fall into a deep, sodden sleep, and I would wake up to stagger through my day, marveling that I was still alive and functioning. Now? Now, I sit here in bed, unable to sleep until 3 or 4 am, and I sleep till noon. I don’t want to eat. It’s hard. I have almost no appetite. I’m sure my endocrinologist’s PA will be thrilled by my weight loss, since she doesn’t seem inclined to examine the reasons why I’m losing weight so long as I’m losing it.

And I’m exhausted. And scared. And lost. And the shocks keep coming. I need to get my car inspected. But I can’t, until the tail light assembly is fixed. Which is going to Cost Money. Which I don’t have, because I have no income. The social security counselor I talked to a couple of weeks ago thinks I should apply for widow’s disability. I really don’t want to do that. One, because I don’t really see it though I do admit, if I had a friend who was going through what I’m going through, I would insist they were disabled. Two, I need to keep my health insurance for at least the next eight years, until my son turns 26 if he doesn’t find a job to provide him with benefits. If I go on disability, I would be required to go on Medicare in three years. And I would rather put that off as long as possible. And third… with our current administration and what they want to achieve with social security and disability? I would have more luck becoming a Dallas Cowboy Cheerleader than getting widow’s disability at this point.

So, I can’t sleep, I’m having a hard time eating, I’m scared, depressed, and sometimes, I’m angry with the Husbandly One. I won’t go into that for now. It’s… all part of grief, I know that. But I hate it. I hate it so much.

I hate that he’s not here. I hate that I’m alone. I hate that he’s not here to hold me and comfort me. I hate that my bed is too big. I hate that my life is never going to be the same again.

I hate that the one person I counted on being there, that I fully expected to grow old with, the person who got me and understood me and I understood him and got him… that person is gone. And I am still here, and… I hate it.

I hate my life right now, and it’s hard to see how I’m ever going to even like it again.

Forty days. It’s so… hard. And lonely.

… And More Wailing…

I hate this. I absolutely hate this. I’m sitting here at 3 a.m., crying, and feeling like I can’t breathe, and I miss him, I miss him so… so… so much, it’s like I can’t breathe without him.

I promised my kids, I promised I wouldn’t follow him, that I wouldn’t just… collapse and die, too, but this is so hard. It was the Impertinent Daughter’s biggest fear, that she would lose me, too, and here I am, struggling to just make through each day.

And then a bombshell of the most unpleasant kind. I went online to check our bank balance and noticed a withdrawal for over $1800 from our checking account. A withdrawal that I did not authorize, nor did it say who had made it or where it had gone. The amount was oddly familiar, and I went back through the checkbook to see anything that matched.

And then I realized it matched the exact amount of his final disability check, a check that had been automatically deposited three days before he died.

I’ll call in the morning to make sure, but I greatly suspect Social Security reclaimed the money. His death certificate hasn’t even been signed yet, and the government swooped in to reclaim the money.

My oldest sister warned me that would happen, but I thought I’d get some sort of notification of it first.

What. The. Hell.

We’re okay, for now, but that leads to a whole new level of anxiety. Money. And the bills. Oh, my fucking gods, the bills. I am flailing because of the bills and I have no fucking clue what I’m going to do. I mean, I paid my health insurance premium today and started hyperventilating when I saw what it was going to go up to at the start of the new year.

And then I’m caught in another spiral of grief and struggling to breathe, and… how do I do this???

Widow’s Wail

I don’t want to do this anymore. I don’t want to do this without him. I don’t want to sit here, staring at the bills, wondering what the fuck I’m going to do now.

I don’t want to keep waking up and he’s not here. I don’t want to try to sleep in our bed without his warm presence. I don’t want to figure out what to do next without his input, or without knowing we’re going to go on another adventure together.

This is so fucking hard. People walk up to me, tell me how sorry they are, how much I must miss him, how awesome he was, or that he was important to them. They hug me, and then they go on with their lives and I’m just… here… the equilibrium I’m struggling to maintain totally thrown off as I’m reminded of my loss again, and I cry the whole way home in the car, missing him and wanting him here, as useless as that is.

I wade through bills that didn’t get paid because he had chemo brain and kept telling me not to worry, he was handling it and I didn’t want to hurt his pride, so I said, “Okay, hon, that’s cool.” Except it wasn’t getting handled, and I didn’t know that until I took over the checkbook back in August and I’m STILL finding stuff that didn’t get paid, and there’s no money coming in, only going out, and holy fuck, how did we get here????

And I’m still waiting for the crematorium, still waiting for the state of Texas to get off their ass and sign the death certificate, still waiting, still waiting, still waiting…

And I can’t bear to think of his body in a drawer, I can’t bear to think of his body being burned, but… that was what he wanted, and… I try not to think about it, I try really hard… and… I miss him, I miss him, I miss him…

I almost can’t breathe for missing him. How do people get through this?? How do you bear it? How do you not give up?

How am I supposed to spend the next ten, twenty, thirty years without him?

My daughter looks at me sometimes with fear in her eyes. She leans into me and says, “Mom, please… don’t you leave us, too. Don’t get sick and die. I need you. I can’t plan two funerals.”

I’m doing my best. I really, really am.

My son checks on me constantly. “Mom, you right? You okay? Mom, have you eaten? Mom, here, have some water. Crying makes you dehydrated.”

I made myself get out of bed. I made myself get something to drink. I haven’t eaten yet. I just… don’t want to, but I know I’ll have to.

I miss seeing his Facebook Messenger icon up on my phone, I miss him pinging me with silly observations, or sending me photos of whatever the cats were doing, or something he saw outside, or a funny meme he found. I miss laughing at things with him, or watching movies and talking to the TV. I miss arguing with him and making up and teasing and laughing and crying and… all of it. I miss all of it.

What am I supposed to do now?

Seven Days….

Last Sunday,November 10th, a little after 2:18 a.m., the Husbandly One breathed his last breath and was gone. Just like that.

I was trying to give him a dose of medication to clear his airways, and had just asked him to open his mouth a little wider so I could get the oral syringe in. His eyes flicked toward me, his lips moved and he whispered… something… and then he was gone. I had stared at him, then stood up and said, “Oh,” in shock.

Our friend, K, who was there helping me with the night watch, stood up and leaned over him to look, then looked at me, her eyes wide with shock, and she said, “Oh,” the same exact way I had.

The next thing I knew, I was wrapped tightly in her arms, and I was roaring with grief as my knees threatened to buckle, because the worst thing ever had just happened to me, and I was trying not to leave with him.

Most of that night is a blur. I remember staring at his face earlier in the night, thinking death was coming soon as I noticed how his skin was molding to his skull. I remember staring at his face after the hospice folks had cleaned him up and dressed him, touching his face and crying at how small he was, how thin, how… cold. I remember sitting on the couch in the dining room, holding E’s dear, dear face in my hands as she told me she loved me. I said, “I know you do, because you came here without your teeth.”

I remember how kind the hospice people were, and the policeman who came in with extremely neatly threaded eyebrows. I remember my sister holding me so tight and telling me how sorry she was, and my other sister on the phone, telling me how much she loved me. I remember the guy from the funeral home, who sounded like Barry White. And I remember looking out the back door at this extremely beautiful sunrise and being startled that so much time had already passed.

And now, it’s been seven days. Seven days since my husband died. Seven days since I last looked into his face, wishing I could relieve his suffering, and knowing there was nothing I could do except respect his wishes. He’d been unresponsive since Thursday morning. His last clearly spoken words to me were, “I can’t breathe.”

And because he was in hospice care, and had a Do Not Resuscitate order, I called Hospice and not 911. They helped me calm him down and get him breathing almost normally, but he was practically comatose after that. If you asked him to blink to answer yes/no questions, he’d do it. He’d smile, or smirk, or waggle his eyebrows, and he would hold your hand, squeeze it, and tug on it.

We held his hand around the clock. Seriously. We took it in shifts, there was always someone there to hold his hand when I needed to sleep, or to eat, go to the bathroom, go outside and cry… someone held his hand continuously. If you didn’t, he’d look for a hand, reaching out and trying to find one.

So we held his hand.

It’s been seven days since I held his hand. Seven days since I ran my fingers through his hair and talked to him. Seven days since I lost the one person who got me and loved me anyway. Seven days since I told him I loved him and he squeezed my hand back to say, “I love you, too.”

Seven days of pretending to be a functional competent adult. Seven nights of sleeping alone in my full-sized bed that suddenly seems way too big. Seven days of pushing down panic and staying calm so my kids stay calm. Seven days of not going through the stacks of mail and papers on my desk to find out what OTHER bills didn’t get paid.

Seven days of missing my best friend, the person I tell everything first, seven days of wanting to tell THO something, or ask him something, or just wanting to see him, just because.

Seven days of missing his Facebook Messenger icon being constantly up on my phone, because we sent jokes, memes, or photos we’d just taken of something interesting to each other.

Seven days. And I will never, ever be the same again.

Fuck. Cancer.

Life As We Know It…

This is one of the hardest things I’ve ever done in my life. And… I have no idea how to do it.

It hit me really hard today. I realized it’s almost the end of the month, and I need to have my car inspected and get new tags. And I know where the form for my car is, and thought, well, I’ll take it in and have it inspected, then go to the courthouse… and was walking into the house after I’d gotten back from the hospital, thinking of what I need to do and what I need to have on hand. And then I though, you know, I should look at the tags on the Husbandly One’s truck, so I’ll know when to get that done, too.

And I was shocked to discover that the truck is due, too. This month.

No problem, I though. THO will find the form for his truck and he’ll take it to be inspected when I take the CR-V…. and it hit me.

No, he won’t. He’s not ever going to drive that truck again. And he won’t be telling me where he squirreled the form away, at least not until he returns home to go into hospice care.

It took everything I had not to crumple to my knees right there in the front yard.

He’s… going into hospice. He’s not continuing chemo. He’s letting go, and OMG, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t bear to even think it. I can’t bear to think of life without him. I can’t bear not growing old with him. I can’t… I can’t do this alone. I can’t do this without him.

And I’ll have to. I’ll have to, because my daughter needs me, and my son needs me and… I’m going to have to live, I’m going to have to suck it up and not give up, I’m going to have to keep going somehow and not have the person I love most there to tell the thing I just thought, or show him what I just made, or… how do I survive this? How do I keep going?

Right now, he’s in the hospital, and they’re going to put in a feeding tube, but I noticed today that he has a DNR tag on his wrist and…

How do I help him through this?

How do I… DO this…?

The Blank Page…

You know, it’s tough enough being a writer, but right now? Being a writer is almost impossible. It’s so hard to focus. I’m still working on the flu story… at least the research end. The working title is still “The Pestilential Adventures of Mrs. Osgood Peabody,” but when it comes to thinking of what the actual title should be, I’m kind of at a loss. Originally, I intended to have zombies in it… well… not real zombies, more like people having an weird interaction with high fevers and a new antiviral medication but… I can’t make that work, so… I think I’ll just play up the “return of the 1918 pandemic but worse” angle.

Still, it’s difficult to find the energy to work on it. I spend so much time worried over the Husbandly One, trying to get him to eat, or trying to help him over the next hurdle, that I have very little left over for writing. Even fanfiction is difficult right now.

I spent a great deal of last night crying, but that’s basically my emotional settings rebooting, you know? I cry, and cry, and get it out of my system, and then I feel better. I absolutely hate crying, though.

But writing. I need to be writing. I really, really, really need to be writing. Because writing is what I do and what I love and… I need to do this, for me and for him. To show him that his faith in me has not been in vain. I need to do this.

I need to do this.

So… get over yourself and JUST FUCKING WRITE!

It’s Worse at Night…

Nighttime is the worst.  There are nights when I just can’t sleep.

I worry.  I worry a lot.

I worry about my kids.  Granted, my oldest is an adult, and will soon be graduating with her BFA, possibly by next fall, and my youngest will be 18 in a month.  But I still worry.

I worry about our finances.  I worry that we’ll lose our insurance.  I worry that the Husbandly One will get worse, or he’ll give up.  There are times, when he’s asleep, that I will lay there and cry, dreading the inevitable.  I still have no clue how to deal with that.  He’s 54.  I thought we’d be in our 80’s or 90’s before that became an issue.

But, unless some radical new miracle treatment comes along… I can’t even think about it, even though I do.

I wonder, sometimes, if this ridiculous lingering illness I can’t seem to shake off is really just extended broken heart syndrome.

During the day, we go along as always, trying to come up with enough energy between the two of us to get basic chores done.  Clean the kitchen, do the laundry, vacuum the house, hack back the bamboo that’s trying to take over the back and front yards because the people who owned the house before us were idiots who really though they could keep the bamboo confined to one tiny spot in the yard.  We run errands, feed the cats, putter among the plants, watch the ducks, talk to the kids, you know, all the things you do during the course of the day.  And it’s so much easier to push back the fear and anguish, the worry… I can focus on other things and do stuff.

But at night?  So much harder.  The house gets quiet.  I’m tired.  I lay down, turn out the light, wrap my arm around him and think, “He’s thinner today.” And then it starts.

It’s so hard.  I lay there, my eyes burn, my face stretches as I force myself to breathe normally, fighting back tears as I think desperately, Please, please, don’t take him away from me.  Don’t take my husband, the love of my life, my best friend… don’t take him away from me…

Sometimes, he just… knows, and he’ll turn over, asking me if I’m okay.

“I’m fine,” I lie.  “Just… hurting a little, that’s all.”

No need to tell him that it’s not my joints hurting.  Then we’d both be awake for the rest of the night.

Sometimes, I’m able to calm myself down and finally relax into sleep.

But some nights… some nights, I can’t.  Some nights, I have to get up and go sit in the living room, or out on the back porch if the weather is nice.  Somewhere I can sit and cry my heart out, because… while I know the chemo is working NOW… I know that one day, hopefully years from now, but one day, he’ll be done.  He’ll have had enough, he’ll be tired, and he’ll say, “Enough.”

Quality of life over quantity.

I can’t even think about that right now.  It’s really selfish of me, I know.  But I can’t even bear to think about it.  The selfish, immature part of me wants to scream out, “DON’T LEAVE ME ALONE!!”

The selfless mature part of me is yelling it, too.

I just… can’t even think of sleeping in that bed without him in it.  I can’t think of being in that room without him.  In this house.  This life.

On the 16th, we’ll have been married for 28 years.  I’m hoping for 28 more, but you know what?  I’ll take every damn second I can get.

Tonight is one of those sleepless, full of worry, terror, and grief nights.  My focus for the last two years has been so narrow, just… getting through, day by day.

Seriously, I am barely coping with any of this.  And I hate that about myself.

Day by day.

Now, if I can just get through tonight…