After awhile, our friends and family don't get the daily loss reminders we do. I get these strong urges to post on social media and remind them but those posts have evolved into a way to try and help anyone who needs it. This week, as I sit in my car, I just started writting.....

It’s been almost 2 years since Clayton passed away. Sometimes it feels like yesterday and sometimes it feels like an eternity.

I am finally saying goodbye to another year without my Husband. For me, 2018 and 2019 have been the most difficult years of my life. As I close 2019, I want to let you all know that I will be no longer writing blogs anymore. 

For 2020, I need to focus on my health, my child and trying to get back to who I once was. In all honesty, my health is not the greatest. I have heart issues, along with other medical issues. I ask that you all keep me in your prayers, as I am trying to be here for my baby girl. Today is my 33rd birthday, and I hope to have another 33 years to go. 

Thank you all for your beautiful, sincere, and thoughtful comments throughout my blogging experience. This community really helped me understand, that I am not alone in this. So many of you have shared your pain and sorrow with me, and I wish I could take it all away. Life is incredibly hard and lonely. But I know that it can also be beautiful. 

This is the eve of what the world celebrates as New Year's.

But, since Time has ceased to hold any meaning for me since Chuck's death, I've taken it upon myself to designate my New Year as beginning on April 21; the anniversary of Chuck's death.

That's the time when I reflect on whatever needs reflecting upon. It's when I do a self-check, and it's a time that is meaningful to me.

I realize, more and more, that Time is merely a social construct. It's necessary, in our culture, to keep our worlds moving, I suppose, but for those of us left behind, it's a mish mash of how can it be so long? and oh my god it's been forever! There doesn't seem to be a whole lot of in between.

Recently I also made the decision to stop counting the years since Chuck's death. Not because it doesn't matter; it very much does. But my heart can't manage it. I started sorting it all out and it will soon be 7 years and...nope. Not doing 7 years. In my mind, and what I will forever tell people henceforth, it has been 6.5 years. Period.

Additionally, since I'm stopping counting the years since his death, I will no longer age. I'm 61 now, and that's the age I'll stay. I'm already one year older than Chuck was when he died. Enough already.

Yes, yes, of course there are those who might say, behind their hands, that I've gone nuts. Crackers. Over the edge. Look at the crazy widow! they'll whisper.

Behold the field of fucks I don't give.

I stopped caring about other's opinions of me a looooong time ago. In fact, the first thing I'd tell anyone new to this community is to install a hinge on their elbow so that it automatically shoots up when someone offers an opinion/comment/suggestion about the right way to widow, and your fingers automatically flip them a bird. 

You can, of course, in order to appease such people, stare at your elbow/hand in shocked surprise that this happened. Act horrified if you wish. You've made your point with them.

In some ways I relish the prospect of being known as the crazy widow lady. Kind of a cool rep, in my mind.

I will, of course, be the crazy widow lady dressed all in pink and what's that all about? they'll ask, not really wanting to know the answer.

That's okay, too.

I'm going to just be over here, driving my pink car, towing my pink trailer with the names of all these loved ones on it, shooting sparkle and glitter at everyone. Giving hugs. Getting hugs. 

The crazy widow lady in pink.

Cool beans~

A week ago I was given an opportunity at a big event to share with my essential oil community about inclusion, community and growth. It amazes me what has come into my life in the past year. Part of my oil journey is the loss of Tin. I share about him in every speech I give. I share about Soaring Spirits and I share about the widowed Facebook support group, A Widow’s Valor, that gives those in the Young Living oily community a place to be surrounded by other oilers. Talking about my loss isn’t easier, it’s just different. I’ll always be a work in progress and, as I practice reflection and present time, I can pull myself from the tough days to look at the big picture of my journey and rebuilding. When I stop and take time to look at my journey I can see that I have accomplished something amazing – I survived and now I’m beginning to thrive.

I wish I could post the meme here that had me snorting water through my nose I laughed so hard.

Alas! I keep getting an error note, so I'll have to describe it and you envision it for yourself, okay?

The meme was 3 shrouded in black figures, riding one of the old timey merry go rounds.

The kind made of metal, and you'd hang on desperately as someone standing next to it whisked it faster and faster.

The words in the meme said when you and all your friends are dead inside and hate life but still have fun together.

Seriously. It was frickin' hysterical. 

I laugh like a lunatic every time I see it.

Which is frequently, because I printed it out and put it on the wall next to my desk.

I’ve always felt that, 5 years after Megan’s death, I wouldn’t feel like a widow anymore.  Not counting those first few months, when I swore up and down that my life was over and that I would never, ever move forward or be able to love again, I consider myself very realistic.  I have a stable career. Shelby is and always has been well-adjusted, smart, and healthy. I’m not under mountains of crushing debt, or struggling to make ends meet.

By 3 months, my focus had already shifted from being “lost” to being “off track”, if that means anything different.

Most of the time, my premonition rings true.  I don’t focus on the fact that Megan is dead on my day to day life.  I do not identify myself as a widower anymore than I identify myself as a Marine, network engineer, or high school graduate.  The titles are no more than a minor addition to the whole sum that is “me”.

Then again, with my sixth Camp Widow attendance, in Toronto next weekend, the title of “widower” gains greater significance.  It becomes “who I am” for a few weeks.

It seems that my imagination...what goes on in my mind to help me manage this life...has ramped up.

Almost any situation I encounter has a counterpart from various movies I've watched over the years.

The big picture of all of this is me in the middle of a romantic comedy.

I've always loved watching romcoms.

Chuck used to watch them with me.

Being afraid and doing it anyway. That’s what they say courage is all about. I’m sure most people don’t see themselves as courageous. I think because the idea of being afraid and doing it anyway is often associated with enormous, heroic action.

In fact, I would pretty much consider myself the opposite of courageous and always have. I get all spazzed out if I’m late to things. I am endlessly nervous about missing a flight somehow, despite never once having had this occur. I’m paralyzed by moments of having to make choices and decisions… spending what most people would probably consider a ridiculous amount of time weighing the pros and cons and potential outcomes of each possible choice. I take too many things too seriously too much of the time. And of course, I’m constantly afraid people are going to die and I’ll regret some choice I made somehow...

I’ve felt abnormal my whole life. Ever since I became aware of how my own childhood with a single father who was an alcoholic was far different from the seemingly idyllic 2 parent households of all the other kids at my private school. I’ve never fit in. I’ve never felt like I fit in. Largely, because of death and grief.

When my mom died, I became consumed by death. I thought about people dying all the time. I obsessed over my dad dying and not knowing what would happen to me then. I was nine. No one talked about it, we just pretended it didn’t happen and tried to keep going. That’s how things were done back then.

That feeling of not being normal was further enforced in my teen years. Without a mom, I didn’t know how to be like other girls. I had no one teaching me how to do makeup or shave my legs or to talk to about boys. I just had to learn a lot of things on my own… and often painfully and embarrassingly failed at it. Those were the years my dad started drinking again too. So while other kids were busy being worried about tests at school or winning the big game or how their hair looked that day, I was walking beside them to class wondering if my dad would be too drunk to pick me up from school. Or if he would die in a car wreck because he was drinking and then I’d be totally alone and what the hell would happen then?

The only place I didn’t feel all those things, was when I was making art or spending time with the few close friends I did have. It was the only time I didn’t have to live in that reality. When I was making art especially… I could create a whole other world for myself that had nothing to do with my reality.

It’s ironic as I sit here now, looking back at those difficult early years. At my relationship to death and how it has changed over time. Death has altered my life so drastically since such a young age. For so long, I was alone with death. I never met other kids who had lost a parent. Literally, not a single kid I knew growing up had also lost a parent. I think that’s what made it worse. Even though I have siblings they were all grown and out of the house… so I just felt very alone with death.

Then, I lost my fiance in 2012 suddenly, and death showed up again to alter my entire world. This time though, death did something a little bit different. I still felt very alone in the world of my pain and my grief. We all do in some way. But now, I was an adult, and I could make my own choices about death. There were certain things I learned that I can control. And one of those turned out to be community.

I watched the first episode of a new show on Netflix this morning called Dead to Me. In the episode, two women meet at a grief group, both widows. They end up building a new friendship as late night phone buddies since neither of them are able to sleep. The show goes on to take a lot of unexpected twists and turns (and believe me you should so watch it!), but that one aspect had me remembering the early days of my widowhood… of building friendships with fellow widows in the wee hours of the night.

When I first connected with other widowed people, it was through a private Facebook group. Many of us ended up fairly often online, in the middle of the night. Effectively being late-night “phone” buddies for each other when we could not sleep. There was almost always someone there ready to listen, in the middle of the night or any other time of day that we just needed to feel heard and lay down our guard. And because we got each other, there was just this ease. A kind of comfort no one else could really provide. I ended up making a few of my closest friends from that initial group, people I now travel to see and talk on the phone with often.

I was fortunate to have found groups like that online, and to have since built friendships with people who will actually fulfill the words “Call me ANYTIME”. I have used that lifeline even now, seven years after my fiance died. Because new things do come up. You start dating again. You move in with someone new. You get engaged to someone new. You hit the 5 year mark or the 10 year mark from your person’s death. New stuff always comes.

So yes, I have been very fortunate to find places to spill out all my shit no matter the time of day. But I do remember for about the first 6 months, I didn’t have that.