Love is forever…One woman’s journey with grief

Hiya Sweetie,

I can’t believe it’s almost December.  I am used to being without you, and not used to it at all.  I sigh a lot, and tell myself it’s only temporary, but tempus fidgets, and the tempus in this case is of unknown quantity and could be another whole lifetime to me.  It’s all relative.  I guess that’s the sign that I’m not "grief-free" yet, not that I really thought I was, but that I imagine myself sighing for the rest of my life.  Sometimes I wonder if that’ll subside, and when it does, will it feel like freedom or will I mourn again?  Maybe both.  I probably shouldn’t worry about it.  The future will take care of itself, regardless of what I think.  I cannot worry it into submission; I can’t speculate it under my control.  I did it for years, and it never did one damn bit of good.  My world was pulled out from under me anyway when you left, and there’s nothing I could do about it or undo about it, no matter how much I want to.  

I still find myself disbelieving this.  How could they be scattering your ashes?  You have ashes???  Where are you?  How can you not be here?  I find this so peculiar, that the bafflement persists when I am not at all unclear on the facts.  Perhaps that’s the issue.  My brain knows you’re gone, my mind tries to make sense of it in some greater scheme, such as that of "what I thought my life would be," and fails miserably, and my heart doesn’t want to have to believe it.  My heart just wants you.  That’s all.  Don’t even try to talk to it about anything else.  Don’t try to talk sense to it; it ain’t listening. 

It always comes back to that:  it matters not one iota what I know or understand or glimpse of the greater universe as a result of your passing.  I just want you, here, with me.  For everything that’s changed, for all the "progress" I’ve made through my grief, that feeling is an eternal flame.  It hasn’t changed.  I don’t know that it ever will.  

His ashes were scattered yesterday, at what I understand was a very beautiful place on a rainy day.  "Everyone" was there.  Everyone but me.  Again.  He is not the ashes.  He is not the dust.  He is what he always was:  a beautiful, loving soul who has not left my thoughts or my heart since the day we met. 

I know I can’t take it personally.  They don’t know me; they don’t know me well enough to dislike me.  It is the idea of me that is problematic for them, for whatever their various reasons are.  It’s hard not to take it personally, though, for I AM the person in question.  This is all very personal to me.  I loved him.  I love him.  I will always love him, for an eternity of eternities.  They don’t see that, or don’t want to see that, or see it perfectly and want to pretend they don’t. 

I sat in the breeze, which was coming from the west, as I’d hoped, and played songs for him, singing into the wind, songs I learned just for him.  Songs I wrote for him.

There is nothing I can do about their exclusion, and it says more about them than me.  But I still think it’s a damned shame.

I had been working on backing up A’s and my chat archives a bit at a time in the last four months, but recently I felt spurred to really get off the dime and get them taken care of.  There was a feeling of urgency that I felt I should heed.  Given that technology craps out when you least need it to, and since he died I seem to have had unusually bad luck holding onto those remembrances I had and didn’t care to lose any more, instead of doing a month at a time here and there, I pushed to do several months at a time.  I finished last night, and the archives took me back to February 21, 2005.  I had known A longer than that, but my last laptop crashed and I lost those archives.  He was also a sentimental archiver, though, and he gave me copies, so my collection is complete, if a wee bit disorganized.  But the archives live on my hard drive, on an external disk drive, and have been burned to a CD.  I feel better now.  They’re as safe as I know how to make them.

As is my wont as I’ve been archiving, I read a few here and there.  It slows me way down, so I don’t read them all.  And there’s another reason I don’t read them all, which is that they have to last me the rest of my life, and I feel like I have to ration them.  They are a drug, a drug of memory and longing.  When I read them I laugh out loud, as I did when we had the original conversations.  He was so funny.  I was funny.  We were funnier together, greater than the sum of our parts, which is what you dream of in a true love.

I ran across one dated June 27, 2005.  I started reading it, and even as I felt the horror strike my heart, I still couldn’t stop reading it.  He’d been late to sign on that night.  The reason for his lateness was that he’d been on the phone, first with his soon-to-be ex, and then his brother, sister, and daughter.  His sister-in-law had passed away unexpectedly.  She was 52.  That was bad enough, and had thrown the entire family for a loop, as one would expect. 

The horrible part was the details, which I’d forgotten.  Details that so eerily matched what would happen a little over a year later that I was just stunned as I read.  A’s BIL had been out of town working, and couldn’t get ahold of his wife for two days, despite trying and trying.  Finally, out of desperation, he called the neighbors.  The neighbors called the paramedics who broke into the house, but it was too late.  As it turned out, she died of internal bleeding from an ulcer that had hemorrhaged. 

That brother-in-law doesn’t know it, but I know how he felt.  He doesn’t know that my life echoed his a year later, as I tried to get ahold of my sweetheart and couldn’t, and called everyone I could until I ended up calling the police and e-mailing his family.  And just like for his sister-in-law, it was too late.

Even more strangely, it was this incident, and our discussion of it, that made it possible for me to send that e-mail.  He was blown away that someone his age, a couple years younger, in fact, could die.  It wasn’t supposed to happen.  And on my side, I was in a quiet panic.  If one fifty-something person could die, so could another.  My love.  My parents.  I shared with him my fears that if something happened to him, no one would know to contact me.  So he gave me his daughter’s e-mail “just in case.”

As it happened, I was the first person to realize something was wrong.  So frequent was our contact that the lack of it was remarkable, and frightening.  And when I couldn’t get in touch with him after 2 days, I would be the one to tell THEM that something was wrong.  I still hate the fact that it took me 2 days to call the cops, but I was still hoping to be wrong, and investigating in the meantime.  Had I not, his family wouldn’t have found him until Tuesday night, an additional 2 days later.

And perhaps that is why they have been polite, but distant and not terribly proactive in regards to me.  In addition to the fact that I was, and largely remain, a stranger to them, I was also the bearer of the worst kind of news, and while they were grateful for my assistance, I imagine that some part of them would like to shoot the messenger, as if that would make it all just a nightmare we could wake up from.  Hell, I don’t know—I could speculate what they’re thinking for the rest of my days, and never even get close to the truth of it.  I guess I’m looking for reasons to give them the benefit of the doubt for the way I’ve felt they’ve excluded me, because if those aren’t the reasons, what remain as possible reasons are not positive.

To have lived through this once with him, as his support, only to re-enact it a year later in a different role, leaves me dumbfounded, and wondering what, if anything, it means.  Should I have known?  Did I know?  Should I have forced the discussion of a topic I didn’t even want to consider?  I didn’t want to talk about his potential death, but so many times since he left, I wish we had.

It’s Thanksgiving today.  I know I have many things to be thankful for, more than most folks maybe.  And I know I should count my blessings, and many times I do.  But lately, I find it really hard to do without a "yeah, but…"  Yes, I have much.  I have known great love in the giving and the receiving, and still do.  But I lost my boy, and that just makes it really hard to focus on the good stuff in a global kind of way.  People have said "Be grateful for the time you had," as if I wasn’t all along.  I am so very grateful for him and the life we had together, which is why the loss of it is so painful and sad.  Why is that so hard to understand?

A couple years ago, A mentioned to me that his cotton duck shop apron had seen its last, and once he retired it, he missed it.  For him, walking into the shop each day and tying on his apron was a ritual he cherished.  He said he’d looked for replacements but couldn’t find what he wanted, and had pretty much given up.

Being the resourceful gal that I am, I quietly tasked myself with finding him a replacement apron, searching high and low until I found it in my own virtual back yard at an outfit called the Duluth Trading Co., out of Duluth, Minnesota.  They sell work clothes and camping gear and such—rugged, heavy-duty stuff.  My brother used to work for them now and again, sewing backpacks on the side with my mother’s old sewing machine.  I ordered him two of them and sent them as a surprise.  Turns out they were a little longish, but being the resourceful type, he hemmed them admirably with a stapler.  Sounds like something I’d do.

Ever since that purchase, I’ve received their catalog, and last year at Christmas I ordered him a fleece pullover like one of mine he borrowed and liked when he was here in October last year.  I also ordered him a gear sack and something called Crack Cream, which is like body butter for working men’s hands, only it’s unscented.  Working with wood and sawdust all day, every day, took its toll on his strong hands.

And the catalogs kept coming, once a month, and they’ve started arriving every two weeks now that we’re heading into the holidays.  The only person for whom I ever ordered anything from the Duluth Trading Co. was A, and every time that catalog shows up in my mailbox, it’s like a slap in the face.

After the September one arrived, I went online to cancel its delivery, but there was some problem—I don’t remember if it was a bug on the website or I’d forgotten my password or what—but I couldn’t get it cancelled.  And it kept coming, and I got another one in Thursday’s mail, and I thought “Enough already.”  I told E I really didn’t need it coming.  “Breaks your heart?” he asked, perceptively.  Yep.   It surely does.

So rather than wait until the next one showed up, I called the toll-free number and explained briefly the reason I wanted to be taken off the mailing list, and the gal on the other end of the line said she’d take care of it for me.  I really thought I’d feel better having done it, knowing it wouldn’t be in my mailbox again, a first-class reminder I didn’t need.

But I didn’t.  I felt terrible.  And I cried, hard.  And I tried to figure out why.

I think it was because that since he died, every single loss I’ve had related to and including him was something I just had to accept.  It all happened as it would, and I had no control over it.  I just had to yield.  This is the first thing I have actively done myself to create one of those secondary losses.  I told them to stop sending the catalog, and with that made an active admission that I would never, ever be ordering from that catalog for him again.  When all you have to do is say “Yeah, sure…I accept that’s the way it is,” there’s a tiny bit of denial (at least there seems to have been for me), in the fact that I did nothing to make this fact happen.  In passivity there is the tiniest bit of room for maintaining the illusion that nothing’s changed—look, the catalog keeps coming just like before!  It’s not that I would accidentally order something because I forgot he wasn’t here to receive it.  But as long as the catalog was coming, as unpleasant a reminder as it was, it was one unchanged thing, not yet a loss. 

But to put an end to it myself means I volunteered for the loss this time.  It is a loss, however small, related to him.  So I suppose it is no surprise, then, that I cried and mourned it.  It will not be the last; of that I’m sure.