Time continues to tick by. I've lost track of the exact number of days and weeks since Chris died, but four months is coming right up. I suppose it has been enough time that using months to mark the passage of time is appropriate. Inevitably that will turn to years if my health remains good as well as my fortune. It still takes my breath away that he is gone and not coming back. At the same time, we are functioning in the stark reality that Chris is not here. That dichotomy was confusing for a while and I would berate myself for not being able to be stable in a perspective, but the oscillation between disbelief and acceptance happens with enough regularity that I'm starting to get used to the pendulum swings. It would be an interesting psychological experience to analyze if it only wasn't mine...
I haven't written here much lately but not for lack of reflection - much of the time I am lost in my memories and thoughts. Mostly my writing efforts have been focused on a different project with Health Story Collaborative. This has two parts, a written narrative of our experience and a spoken healing storytelling session later this week (this is not my wheelhouse so I'm nervous). I'll post my final essay here when it is ready. It's an attempt to tell the arc of the whole story in about 2000 words. I had 3500 in my first draft and it didn't treat many of the events and feelings that I could have written about! Crafting it to make a vivid, engaging story is a different exercise than what I have been doing here for the most part, and it has been a valuable, yet draining, undertaking. I'm working with a medical student who is my editor and she has been immensely helpful and will attempt to cut it down with me. The struggle is finishing it off because the story itself doesn't feel complete. I am not inclined to tie it up with a nice shiny bow of optimism, and the trajectory of where I am now headed is not at all clear to me anyway.
Forget the trajectory, where am I now???
I have been extremely busy. Both kids are active in town baseball and so we are at the fields almost every evening. This disrupts working, dinner, homework time, and basically everything. Until spring ball season started, we were not that busy with activities and it wasn't terribly difficult to manage kid logistics solo, but now it feels like I am over my head in the challenges of single parenting. Then we have the other stuff. Orthodontic mishap? I'm on the hook. Septic system pumping? Yep, that's me. Family share day at the elementary school? No other parent option to go, must rearrange my meetings. Car service? Well I'm the only one driving. Estate dealings? Oh for goodness sake's that goes on and yes that's my problem.
But, all of that is just stuff I'm doing, not the real status of where or how I am. This is the situation - I could easily just get consumed by doing all of the things and stop processing what happened. In fact, I do that for days at a time now. Sometimes I tell myself it's just unavoidable, life is so busy as a solo parent! There is an element of truth to that. I have never needed to balance so many things before. Under the surface, though, I feel myself avoiding something. I don't want to look at Chris's death straight on. When I do, it's too hard. Too gut-wrenching. Too sad. Too hopeless. Too damaging for my functioning. Just as you are not supposed to look directly at the sun during an eclipse, my unacknowledged-until-now rule is to guard against the direct confrontation of Chris's death to limit the emotional setback.
I ran into a fellow mom friend at a baseball game. She was kind and asked me how I was doing, saying she knew that Chris and I were always together at the games and just always together in general. She asked if I dreamed of Chris or felt his presence. It was an interesting conversation and I appreciated her taking the risk of going beyond the surface. The truth is that I do not dream of Chris often. The few times I have dreamed of him have been accompanied by a brutal smack of reality upon waking up to find him still dead, and those mornings have not been easy so I don't consciously wish to dream of Chris more often. I accept whatever dreams I remember, having no more control over them than anything else in life. I also do not feel his presence in any way. That is not to say I do not feel his love, because I do. Chris's memory and love lives in my head and my heart, and his love lives in this home. But his actual presence, no.
Only a handful of times have I thought to text Chris or tell him something for real. I think most bereaved people do this frequently and I can understand the tendency, but Chris's decline meant that we gradually lost the old ways of communicating while he was still alive and I got used to not being able to reach out and get a typical response. There was one time when I had an instinct to tell Chris that so-and-so reached out in a surprising way over his death, and then I laughed over the nonsensical nature of it all. Recently I had a flash of an inclination to text Chris when I opened N's math placement letter, and again when J got her first hit in a baseball game. But these are the exceptions, mostly I do not have to remind myself that I can't just reach Chris by phone or email or a conversation anymore.
That said, I still talk to him in my head all of the time. I can't really explain, it's not him in the old sense where I could expect a back-and-forth, it's the memory of him. Apparently a partnership doesn't end quickly. One half is gone, but I can still try to send my messages to him through time and my neuronal circuits. I am sorry. I didn't understand. I wish I could have done better by you. I miss you. I miss you a thousand times over. I love you. I love you to wherever you are and back, and a thousand times over.
The finality of Chris's absence is something that I muse over when I do look at his death straight on. When I force myself to confront it, memories of Chris from the last two years astound me. He knew. He had no illusions that he would come back to be with us in another form. He voiced his anguish over disappearing, never to find out how the kids turned out. This lit a fire under him to make the most of what time he did have. Chris talked with the people he cared about, gave the hugs, took the pictures, made the memories, left behind recordings telling us his wish that we would be happy. When others could not bear to admit he would soon be gone, including myself, he still did those important things. Chris always looked at his situation straight on. He was a magnificent and brave person.
I am trying so hard to do this, whatever this is, right. I want so much to hold Chris in my heart lovingly, gently, and peacefully, because he deserves that. The problem is that I miss him so desperately when I look at his loss straight on that nothing about it is peaceful, and nothing feels right.
Forget the trajectory, where am I now???
I have been extremely busy. Both kids are active in town baseball and so we are at the fields almost every evening. This disrupts working, dinner, homework time, and basically everything. Until spring ball season started, we were not that busy with activities and it wasn't terribly difficult to manage kid logistics solo, but now it feels like I am over my head in the challenges of single parenting. Then we have the other stuff. Orthodontic mishap? I'm on the hook. Septic system pumping? Yep, that's me. Family share day at the elementary school? No other parent option to go, must rearrange my meetings. Car service? Well I'm the only one driving. Estate dealings? Oh for goodness sake's that goes on and yes that's my problem.
But, all of that is just stuff I'm doing, not the real status of where or how I am. This is the situation - I could easily just get consumed by doing all of the things and stop processing what happened. In fact, I do that for days at a time now. Sometimes I tell myself it's just unavoidable, life is so busy as a solo parent! There is an element of truth to that. I have never needed to balance so many things before. Under the surface, though, I feel myself avoiding something. I don't want to look at Chris's death straight on. When I do, it's too hard. Too gut-wrenching. Too sad. Too hopeless. Too damaging for my functioning. Just as you are not supposed to look directly at the sun during an eclipse, my unacknowledged-until-now rule is to guard against the direct confrontation of Chris's death to limit the emotional setback.
I ran into a fellow mom friend at a baseball game. She was kind and asked me how I was doing, saying she knew that Chris and I were always together at the games and just always together in general. She asked if I dreamed of Chris or felt his presence. It was an interesting conversation and I appreciated her taking the risk of going beyond the surface. The truth is that I do not dream of Chris often. The few times I have dreamed of him have been accompanied by a brutal smack of reality upon waking up to find him still dead, and those mornings have not been easy so I don't consciously wish to dream of Chris more often. I accept whatever dreams I remember, having no more control over them than anything else in life. I also do not feel his presence in any way. That is not to say I do not feel his love, because I do. Chris's memory and love lives in my head and my heart, and his love lives in this home. But his actual presence, no.
Only a handful of times have I thought to text Chris or tell him something for real. I think most bereaved people do this frequently and I can understand the tendency, but Chris's decline meant that we gradually lost the old ways of communicating while he was still alive and I got used to not being able to reach out and get a typical response. There was one time when I had an instinct to tell Chris that so-and-so reached out in a surprising way over his death, and then I laughed over the nonsensical nature of it all. Recently I had a flash of an inclination to text Chris when I opened N's math placement letter, and again when J got her first hit in a baseball game. But these are the exceptions, mostly I do not have to remind myself that I can't just reach Chris by phone or email or a conversation anymore.
That said, I still talk to him in my head all of the time. I can't really explain, it's not him in the old sense where I could expect a back-and-forth, it's the memory of him. Apparently a partnership doesn't end quickly. One half is gone, but I can still try to send my messages to him through time and my neuronal circuits. I am sorry. I didn't understand. I wish I could have done better by you. I miss you. I miss you a thousand times over. I love you. I love you to wherever you are and back, and a thousand times over.
The finality of Chris's absence is something that I muse over when I do look at his death straight on. When I force myself to confront it, memories of Chris from the last two years astound me. He knew. He had no illusions that he would come back to be with us in another form. He voiced his anguish over disappearing, never to find out how the kids turned out. This lit a fire under him to make the most of what time he did have. Chris talked with the people he cared about, gave the hugs, took the pictures, made the memories, left behind recordings telling us his wish that we would be happy. When others could not bear to admit he would soon be gone, including myself, he still did those important things. Chris always looked at his situation straight on. He was a magnificent and brave person.
I am trying so hard to do this, whatever this is, right. I want so much to hold Chris in my heart lovingly, gently, and peacefully, because he deserves that. The problem is that I miss him so desperately when I look at his loss straight on that nothing about it is peaceful, and nothing feels right.
Whatever you do, whenever you do it, it will be right. Trust yourself.
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