Widow's Voice

Fragments and Words~

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Believe it or not, I am sometimes at a loss when it comes to writing my weekly blog. Not because I’ve run out of words but because it’s so hard to find other words to write that I haven’t already used. For me, the longer the time since Chuck’s death, the more intimate it becomes to me. And the more intimate it becomes, the fewer words I find that seem able to describe it. So I find myself wanting to write in short, static sentences, which is how my brain seems to work these days. Random thinking that rolls and dips like a coaster in the swells and valleys of my mind.

So, this week’s offering:

I’m so tired. A good part of that might very well have to do with my lousy eating habits. And lack of exercise. And brain fatigue from the fragments of memory streaming through my mind’s eye, of our times together, his last weeks, my last 2 plus years…everything and nothing and more and less and more again. At the end of a day…any day…in so many ways it feels like I’ve accomplished exactly nothing.  It feels like I waste time most of the time.  But at the same time I know that I’m doing intense inside work in my soul, even though I couldn’t tell you exactly what that work is.  I want to create a career as a writer and a speaker and I’m making connections and learning more about both, but these things are also not yet tangible, so, once again, at the end of the day, it doesn’t feel like I’ve done much.

I swear, at times, I can feel a battle happening in my body. The battle between the part of my brain that knows he’s dead and the part that just can’t believe it.  It’s like the clash of the titans or something, seriously.  Swords ringing, shields clashing, slipping and sliding in the blood and the gore. My brain is a fucking sideshow these days.

As I travel in this Odyssey of Love, I meet hundreds of people. Which is a good thing and it keeps me from isolating and I’m so grateful it happens.  I put myself into social situations constantly when I visit family and friends and I stay in the moment when I’m with them, and I interact with them.  I used to love crowds of people, I was at my best when I was in lively conversations but it just isn’t that way anymore.  It takes so much energy to be with anything more than a couple of people at a time and it’s easiest to be with family, so that I can just go away if I so wish.

I don’t know where I went when Chuck died.  I just know that I went away and I know that woman isn’t coming back and I grieve that.  I grieve for so much that was lost.

It kind of freaks me out when I read about other widows, further along than I, who say that their grief is still so hard.  It doesn’t surprise me, but it does freak me out because I think wow, this level of grief just is not sustainable in the long run. Yes, I know that grief is individual and it may not be that way for me.  Forgive me though, for not having a clue what hope is, and my general inability to look into a future that holds only the knowingness of it being without him in it.

I took an online stress test today, where you answer questions about life situations and it measures your stress levels.  It was one of the more common tests used by experts.  The high end for concern was 100 or so.  My number came out over 300.  Holy shit.

But also, no shit, Sherlock.

Are any of you as exhausted as I am?

Have you run out of words too, that describe this clusterfuck?

Do you wish for anything in your life?

Or do you stop at the words I wish,

and then stop

because you don’t know what else to say?

because you don’t know what else to say?    

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~

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