Widow's Voice

6 Years of Tired~

| Posted by:

This isn’t going to be an upbeat blog.

No apologies for that, but fair warning.

I don’t have it in me today.

Yesterday was 6 years since Chuck died.

I wonder why I can’t seem to get wherever it is I’m supposed to get. In this widowed life, I mean.

It’s felt, since I was first widowed, like I’ve had to continually strive to be somewhere in the future.

Happy. Joyful. Loving life. Involved. 

Maybe fucking ecstatic, I don’t know.

And the pressure didn’t always come from others. I’ve put it on myself, too.

I’ve gone my own pace. Insisted on my own pace. Forgiven myself for not being further along. Yadda, yadda, yadda.

There are no easy answers to this life without.

Some guru somewhere would probably tell me that I have to stop thinking of it as “life without”, as a start.

How one does that, I’ve no idea. 

Them’s the facts: my life is a life without, and no matter how much I might try to think of it otherwise, that’s what it is. 

Chuck’s dead. I’m without him. And it’s incredibly lonely, no matter how much I fill it with other people.

I’m lonely for him.

And I’m soooo fucking tired.

On this day after the anniversary of the day Chuck died 6 years ago, I’m out there living a life and creating beauty and doing my damndest to make meaning of all that this life without is.

But seriously, it just isn’t as good as life was with him.

And I don’t know that this will ever change.

Unless there’s a magic recipe somewhere, yet unfound by others like me.

No big news here this evening, folks. No words of inspiration.

Just standing in solidarity with any of you who might be feeling the same sense of withoutness…

 

About Alison Miller

My beloved husband Chuck died while we were full timing on the road. We’d rented a condo for our stay in southern CA, and I had to leave 3 weeks after his death. All I knew at that time was that I had to find a way to continue traveling on my own, because settling down without him made me break into a cold sweat. I knew that the only place I’d find any connection to Chuck again was out on the roads we’d been traveling for our last 4 years together. I knew nobody out on the road, I knew grief was a great isolator, and I knew I had to change the way I traveled without him, to make it more emotionally bearable for me. So I bought a new car, had a shade of pink customized for it, bought a tiny trailer and painted the trim in pink, learned how to tow and camp, and set out alone. My anxiety was through the roof, and all I knew to trust was the Love that Chuck left behind for me. I found Soaring Spirits early on, thank god, and the connections I made through SS helped ground me to some extent. I needed to know that other widow/ers were out there in my world, because I felt so disoriented and dislocated. Through Soaring Spirits, as the miles added up, my rig taking me north, south, east and west, I found community. I found sanity…or at least I learned that if I was bat shit crazy, I was in good company, and realizing that ultimately saved my sanity. PinkMagic, my rig, is covered with hundreds of names of loved ones sent to me by my widowed community, and I know it isn’t visible to the naked eye, but I’ll let you in on a secret…she actually illuminates Love as I drive down the many roads in our country, and I can see it through my side view mirror. Love does, indeed, live on~

TO LEAVE A COMMENT ON A BLOG, sign in to the comments section using your Facebook or Gmail accounts, or sign up for Disqus.