Widow's Voice

This Seemingly Never-ending Road~

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Is it just me?  I wonder, even as I know it isn’t just me.  Logically and because I literally know otherwise, it isn’t just me.  

There’s a boat load of men and women through time immemorial who have lived this shit that I’m living, that we’re all living.

And yet, my brain doesn’t let up about it.

Why are you still so traumatized, Alison? Why can’t you let it go and just remember the love, Alison? Why can’t you just know…really and truly know, and fully accept, that life happens, cancer happens and death happens? Not just death, but Chuck’s death? Why do you struggle so much? Why does it still hurt so much?

And…on and on and on…

I need to make a trauma list, so to speak, for next week as I continue my EMDR sessions, so that we can get hard-line specific with it, get at the meat of the matter, and see what relief I can get from all devastation I carry around in me.

It isn’t just Chuck’s dying that was traumatic (as if that wasn’t enough). It was what went on around it, while he was in hospice, and what went on between me and my step-daughter on the way to the crematorium.

In the midst of nothing normal, kind of normal shit, really, in that a high percentage of families have stupid shit happen when a loved one dies.

But what do you do when the very act of living without your loved one is traumatic?

I know that I’m not the only one who struggles with this, so I guess this is my question for you, in a more or less rhetorical, philosophical way..

Do you just zone out, so to speak, to get through a day?  Do you keep busy distracting yourself but at the end of the day it’s there and you just deal with it?  Do you feel genuine happiness as you go through your day, and, if so, what is it that brings that happiness to you?  Does that sense of loneliness really and honestly recede only when we begin a chapter 2, even though we remain always widowed?  Does it take having a chapter 2 person in our lives, making us feel special, being hugged on a regular basis by someone who loves you, to make the heaviness disappear?

This is the kind of shit I think about when I’m not thinking specifically about Chuck.  I can picture him, if I were to tell him all of this, lightly smacking me on the side of the head and saying to me Stop thinking so much, Miller and then kissing me til I couldn’t think anyways, and I’d end up feeling completely reassured.  But, since he isn’t here, I think of these things, and I feel the trauma of his death and the trauma, not of my life, but of my life without him.

 

So, I sit myself on a sofa every Tuesday and I do various exercises to shift the perception, to manage the grief, to release the stress of grief..thank god for a therapist who is cutting edge in approaching this.

But,seriously, this grief shit is for the birds~

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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