I’ve been spending some time here and there working on the book again, organizing all the pages, thoughts, dreams, adventures since Mike died…rereading much of what I’ve written. It’s been so long I have forgotten a lot of the words I’ve put down, but going through it has brought back much of what I’ve gone through. It’s brought me back in touch with many of the steps and moments I’ve experienced…the process and processing of my grief, that very personal, individual experience, how I’ve grown and changed throughout it, how the very picture of my daily life has shifted.

 

Since we only live in the now, whether we are aware of it or not, the past does not always reflect the present. I have weathered a storm of grief; powerful, difficult emotion and terrible, horrible moments. I’ve learned so much about how it all works…and not just grief, but life itself. Having lost the person most dear to me has been a life-altering experience that shattered what I thought I knew and caused me to pick up the pieces and put them back into a very different design. I am not that same person who found my husband dead those three years ago. I am not the same person who married him; I am not even the same person I was two months ago. And if I hadn’t written things down there is a lot about what I’ve lived through that would have simply been forgotten forever. The pain memory will always be there, but the details have grown foggy, like some sort of protective mechanism in our souls that tries to delete the horrible. Or, maybe it’s just life moving along the way it does, so many little moments simply lost because we cannot possibly remember everything.

 

Each day I open my eyes and cobble together a vision of how my moments will string together that day until I close my eyes again at night. But I have learned I can never anticipate how that vision will be turned upside down or inside out; I have learned something as small as a bird flying through the wind can change the direction of my day. And much of my life is in limbo, as I wait for the notice of the fallout from the foreclosure notice on my house. But I have also learned that it doesn’t take a foreclosure to put us in limbo. We are always at the mercy of life in its myriad parts and pieces flowing around us. Life, death, love, work, family, weather, traffic…it’s all happening like a vortex of energy around us, while we hover somewhere in the middle. Some moments we might spread our arms wide and dance to the rhythm of it all. Sometimes we might curl up into a ball and wish it all away.

 

I wonder how many times I’ve written I still can’t believe he is really gone? That I still find myself sitting and wondering on the idea that my husband is dead? Three years later and some part of me is still desperately grasping for some way to integrate that knowledge into my psyche. He was just so big and full of life, and my life is still so strange without him. I realize now it probably always will be that way. Any feeling of “normal” will always be tinged with memories of my life with Mike, and the bewildering ache that he is no longer with me.

 

And did I happen to mention that I miss him? Yeah, I think maybe I did.