I am tired. I am tired of everything about widowed life. It is heavy. And, for the better part of two years and a handful of months, I have been doing the heavy lifting of grief. I am sick of it. The loneliness. The isolation. The emotional and mental exhaustion. I am tired of all that grief offers. I think I have sampled it all. And, I can say with authority, it all pretty much sucks. Yep. Hard pass on what grief is serving. Thanks, but no thanks. I’m good. I’m fed up. I’m full.
Living with grief is kinda like the stale coffee I drank this morning.
Lacklustre, mediocre and kinda lukewarm.
I would not serve the cruddy coffee I drank to anyone I liked; and likewise,
I would not wish grief on another human being.
Being Mike’s widow is by far the hardest thing I have ever endured. I was building my life around him and his death destroyed everything that I imagined my future to be. When he died I felt my foundation collapse. I buried Mike, but it was me who was buried alive by the wreckage of our dilapidated life. My words are powerful, but they only shine a dim light on the darkness of widowhood. My writing, at best, outlines the landscape of grief and scratches the surface of the aching and ugliness. But, those of us who live with grief know all too well how it relentlessly claws at your Soul – like nothing else can.
There is simply no way to fully explain the awfulness of this mess. Grief must be experienced to be fully understood; and, I do not recommend this experience to anyone. This is not for the faint of heart. That said, with forced practice, I am getting fairly proficient at grief, but it is not something I ever wanted to excel at. I have no desire to become good at grief. I didn’t sign up for this and I would love to revoke my membership to this club. It is not working out for me. It doesn’t suit my lifestyle. It is simply not a good fit.
Grief and I need to part ways. I am tired of waking up with a heavy heart. And, I am equally exasperated about going to bed with a sadness inside me that runs so deep I am surprised it doesn’t drip from me onto my bedsheets. I am detached from everything around me. And, an apathy lives inside me that I can not seem to shake.
I do not want to be unresponsive and dispassionate, but I am. I want to reengage in living, but I haven’t yet. I am tired of being without joy. And, I know full well that the only way to reenter life is to reengage in living, but it is so damn hard to live without him. It is incredibly difficult to breathe life into yourself when you are breathless and running on empty. It is so very hard to action carefully architected plans when your heart feels heavy. Yet, I desperately want to feel the hum of a normal life again. I want to return to days gone by when I was content and deliciously happy.
So, now what? How do I make this happen? I ask myself this question again and again. And, I am not sure. I don’t know. I am simply not sure what to do next. I am unsure about the direction of my life. I am not sure what I can do to recreate a life I am excited about. I could blog about the ideas that swirl around my head and the hopes that live inside my heart, but until I action these things they aren’t real. I haven’t breathed air into any of these thoughts so I keep to them myself for now. Maybe, what’s next is that I will stop drinking stale coffee. I can start tomorrow by making fresh coffee and see where that leads me.
It’s as good a plan as any.
~S.