When your heart and soul are just so tired, 5 years in.

Not for any particular reason, really.

Everything is pretty much the same as it’s always been.

Even when life is routine, my spirit is tired. And, yes, life on the road can be routine.

Tired from doing and being and all the stuff that comes from living a life that is so achingly and shockingly different from the life that was going to be.

Widowing.

How many of us just get out there and do what life requires? How many of us go beyond that requirement and strive to truly create a life for ourselves, alongside all the grief and devastation?

And we do, by god. But, Jesus, it’s exhausting.

To me, anyways.

Underlying all the doing and creating and self-care and just…everything….is the overriding knowing that I’ll never see him again, and I ache all over with that knowing.

Sort of like a continual flu.

And you just learn to live with it.

I have a lot going on right now and I am feeling extremely stressed out.  Life in general is not going well for my youngest daughter, and in order to help her cope I have decided to leave work and stay home with her for her second semester of school this year.  Also, I have just found out that I require surgery on Dec 7th which will take me out of commission for awhile (not to mention I am scared shitless of having the surgery), and I am panicked as to how I will prepare for Christmas around this surgery.  I just can't seem to get it together, and the looming Christmas season isn't really helping.  Christmas #2 without Ben.

In any case, I'm just going to be straight up honest and tell you all that I can't cope with writing a new blog post this week, but I am going to post something that I wrote at the end of November 2015.  When Christmas was looming and I was really stressed out.  I guess November does that for me.  I feel essentially the same today, except Ben was alive back then and I could still see him and touch him and hear him, even if he was mostly sleeping.  So life may have actually been better back then.

I’ve somehow made it through the past week without hitting critical mass.  I won’t say I’ve had my moments, but rather, that the past seven days or so have been one big moment, with little instances of calm peppered in.  Simply put, it was just a rough, overwhelming, busy, tiring week, the kind where you feel both accomplished and exhausted, and it’s hard to allow yourself into a calm state of mind.

It was the kind of week I had quite frequently through the years with Megan, generally it was the weeks she was admitted to the hospital, and our routine suddenly got turned on it’s head.