marybethgaige

Reliving the trauma – a year without your voice

My dearest Tim,

I had told myself this time was going to be hard. This week especially, but mostly the time between Mother’s day and Father’s day when I’d re-live the worst 26 days of my life… the memories of the hospital… when all of the sudden I’d flip the switch, and Facebook would no longer share “1 year ago” memories that you had posted…. all of YOUR posts would all be older than that…. putting you just a little further away from us.

I thought I had prepared myself for how hard this was going to be. But I had no idea. Similar to what I said in my Pain post, its hard to imagine that it’s real – the physical manifestation of grief, or that you have no control over it… much as you may WANT to be happy, to live in the present, the past has a way of sneaking up and taking the wind out of you. Even just seeing May 16th or June 11th on the calendar, or on a meeting notice that I am sent… it takes my breath away. I sometimes think that you would laugh at this… call it my obsession with dates… but I mostly think this was all so beyond your realm of imagination, that you would accept whatever I think/feel/experience as fact.

I’ll tell you what I have planned for tomorrow. Because it will make you laugh. You will shake your head because you think its ridiculous, and smile because it’s so me….

I remember what I wore that day. May 16, 2017. It was a Tuesday. I went into work my regular time after taking A to the bus stop, and taking R and D to daycare. I left work like a bat out of hell after lunchtime because you told me you had vomited and you still had a fever and were sweating through your clothes. But I often wonder, why did I even go to work that day? What if I had realized how sick you were, and simply stayed home and just lay in bed with you… sleeping while all the kids were at school or watching Netflix. What if I had had those final, quiet, peaceful moments with you? Moments I can never get back…. but I rushed to work because we were working a Task Order proposal… because I would have felt so much guilt to send the kids to school and lay in bed with you…so much guilt to not be contributing at work… I remember what I wore because I remember looking down at the skirt in the hospital. A long, flowery skirt. After that day I would look at that skirt and it would remind me that I went to work that day, instead of reading the signs and staying home with you… I couldn’t take seeing it much less wearing it so I put it at the back of the closet. So I wouldn’t have to see it, and feel that guilt and heartbreak. I will wear it again tomorrow. Because let’s be honest, I’m going to feel the guilt and the heartbreak tomorrow no matter what.

A year since I heard your voice. Since you teased me. Since I heard your laugh. Since I told you not to pull out your catheter and freaked out your nurses… who I then had to explain about my bad-patient-father who you, my rule-follower, are nothing like… who told me they thought girls married men like their fathers… and I said, not my sister and I!

So often I hate how things went down. That I never got to ask you… so many things. That I never got to hear directly from you what you’d want me to do on my own… But mostly I don’t hate it. You would have hated to face your own mortality. Better that all you knew was that you had pnemonia.

Here’s a really fun fact about the disease that you got:

Median age at diagnosis of SMZL is 69 years. The overall age-adjusted incidence is 0.13/100,000 habitants per year. The percentage change in age-adjusted incidence is 4.81%, with most of the patients being White. Gender prevalence is controversial, but there is an increasing trend to male predominance. – from the NIH at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5457460/

Seriously. 69 years. You had literally JUST turned 37. What. the. fuck?

I had a dream last night in which you and Colleen were playing golf… I can’t imagine Colleen playing golf…and I don’t think you played at all since A was born… Maybe a trip or two to Top Golf with friends?… But you were in this little stretch with strips of green grass… and I had the impression that you guys were growing tomatoes in the patches of dirt in between…the area was small but it overlooked the ocean…like you guys were hitting balls out into the ocean. The kids were up a bunch last night so I was in and out of sleep… I dreamed this scene and later I dreamed it again like I was watching it on TV… with other people… remembering you and Colleen… and I told the people with me “its how I imagine them in paradise.” (Though I’m not sure if that’s true?) You were both facing away from me so I never saw your faces….but I heard your laughter...and I can hear it still.

I had another dream too, which was so much worse. All of the sudden I was at your side as you took your last breaths again. Only this time it wasn’t your dad there with me, it was my sister. And she wasn’t on the other side of you, she was behind me. I remember looking down and both your legs had been amputated at the knee. There were just two silver plus signs. I asked the nurse why and she said because you didn’t need them any more, you couldn’t walk. They told me you were gone… I was lying on your chest again, feeling the last of your warmth, the lack of machine-breathing that there was at the very end. The silence when they turned off all the beeps on all the machines for me…. I forget why but Jean said to me then that you were gone, you were not suffering… And she said that dad was suffering more, so much worse…(in fairness, I know she’d never actually say that to me, but it probably is true)… and my response was “there is nothing worse than this” and I sobbed and fell to the floor. I woke then to D calling for me, in my bed with R asleep beside me. My eyes were dry but squinting, and my whole body was still shaking from those wracking dream-sobs.

Damn, that was a terrible way to start the day. This Tuesday-after-Mother’s-day. You would tell me not to celebrate anniversaries of sadness, but I can’t help it, Tim. I can’t control my dreams. I can’t control re-living the trauma. All I can do is survive it. And keep our kids alive and thriving. I don’t know that I am doing this dead parent child raising thing right, but I’m doing my best.
I have low moments. I have low lows. Sometimes I think they would have been so much better off to have had you rather than me. But I chase away the lows, I chase away the “what ifs” as you would want me to… I don’t make you proud every moment, but damn, I am trying. I miss you as my love, my husband, my partner, my co-parent, but more than anything else, I miss you as my best friend. Isn’t that a funny thing about life?

I don’t know if paradise is playing golf into the ocean and growing tomatoes with Colleen, but I can imagine it to be the sound of your laughter. This morning I heard your son laughing in the other room. It was the most amazing sound of baby giggles. But it was also solid, joyous, sustained laughter, and I thought of you. Wherever you are, Tim, keep laughing, keep Col laughing, and I’ll do the best I can to keep your legacies laughing, until we are reunited.

All my love, always,

MaryBeth

Mother’s Day

The village is amazing, and many people reached out to me regarding Mother’s day plans and for this I am so incredibly grateful…

I answered them mostly in much the same way, “I have very complicated feelings about mother’s day.”

And that’s the truth. I do. My feelings about mother’s day are very complicated. Mostly, maybe because they are overwhelmingly negative. And no one is supposed to feel negatively about mother’s day, right? Especially not when you are a mother, right?

So at the simplest level there is this: Mother’s day is the day when my husband got sick… and never got better. And that was last year.

But there’s more. We spent many mother’s days at the winery where we got married. In 2015 we had a great day there. I had a bit too much to drink, and that night, after we got the girls to bed, Tim and I had the worst fight of our marriage, or our friendship, of all the years we’d known each other. I was very willing to move on from the memory of that low moment. But Mother’s day 2016, when I was 8 months pregnant, he “had to work” and I took the girls there alone, and met my friends with my pregnant belly for a day at the vineyard. Last year, even before he got sick, he told me he didn’t want to go…. that he couldn’t go there on Mother’s day and remember the lowest point of our relationship. And I was incredibly moved. I was a little bitter, that he was making my holiday about his feelings… but I was also moved that that lowest point in our relationship had such an effect on him.

So last year, I didn’t have a lot planned. Maybe Peterson’s (ice cream) in the afternoon. The girls had swim lessons in the morning.. When he asked me what I wanted for Mother’s day I said…. to sleep in, to get time in the bathroom alone.
I was running low on my perfume. If he could order some more on Amazon that would be great. Maybe it would be great to get another family photo shoot, since the last was in October when Declan was only 3 months old… but it was probably too late for that… He told me I’d get a Mother’s day do-over. He was so incredibly sorry for being sick and not helping with the kids at all all weekend.

But I will never get that Mother’d day do-over. Although honestly, people take a lot of the logistics off my hands. And I have often thought, I’d take all the hard stuff and the exhaustion of the day-to-day, for just one more day with my Tim. But that is not meant to be.

And I often wonder – was I bitter? Or did he think I was? I’d hate for him to have thought that…. there was a text from him that weekend where he thought I was ignoring him and said “I know you’re mad at me but..” And in telegram there is no response to that… but I know I went up to our bedroom and saw him and said “I’m not mad, hun, I’m just tired, and busy. with the kids.. what do you need?” It just makes me hope I wasn’t bitter.

And maybe there’e also the what-ifs. The what-ifs that I try my best to chase away but creep in. What if it wasn’t mothers day but a regular weekend – maybe then he would have given me more details? What if not wanting to burden me on Mother’s Day weekend made him hold back details of how he was feeling that would have raised my red flags sooner, or given me critical information to help the doctors make a diagnosis sooner? What if it being Mother’s day was the problem?

Tonight I went to see the movie Tully with two mom-friends. And in the end, it made me feel better. I don’t remember feeling bitter exactly, but if I did, it was no more than the average new mother with a baby who doesn’t sleep through the night. I loved him. He knew that. No matter if I was exhausted that weekend, no matter if we had that terrible fight in 2015. He knew how much I loved and was dedicated to him, always. I showed it in life, and I show it now.

Maybe some day I will feel differently about Mother’s day, but for now, and for my children, I will grin and survive it, just like I do every day.

Daddy’s Girl #2

By the nature of more time together, and being the oldest, and their love of watching sports, there are infinitely more photos of Tim with A. She was the quintessential Daddy’s girl. R has always been attached to me, and it seemed whenever dividing and conquering was necessary, Tim took A, and I took R. He did a lot of fun daddy-daughter things with them both on Sunday mornings when D was first born, including an adventure where he printed out a map and they followed it all over the county… to Home Depot, Lowe’s, Barnes and Noble, Target….

Despite there being less total photos, R was daddy’s girl too. He adored her. And she adored her daddy. I love the picture I have of them in the hammock on her 4th birthday where he posted “chilling like April birthdays do.” The shared birthday month and astrological sign was a special connection for them.

She is our sensitive flower, and I know she struggles with her grief. She sometimes tells me she can’t remember his face. We have pictures all over so I don’t point this out. I don’t think a picture will help. She is getting her little heart and head around her grief and her loss, and she has poignant words for it sometimes. These have included “I can remember daddy’s glasses, but I can’t remember his face.”

These photos were from a year ago today. A Sunday afternoon when Tim returned from a brew tour weekend in Richmond with 5 of his best friends. He walked in and told me he was tired. I was like um, right, but you know I had all 3 kids all weekend, right?!? D was down for his nap, and Tim asked R if she wanted to go nap with him in the hammock. “Yes!” and they both fell asleep. I took the photo below of them in the backyard from our window. Then I brought the monitor outside. A had run down to play at a neighbor’s house, and I was sneaking off for a quick pedicure with one of my friends (and a wife of one of his friends from the brew tour!) The other two photos he took, their view from the hammock, and of course – a selfie of he and R.

I am grateful for the photos. I can always tell her how much he adored her, but a picture speaks a thousand words.

The memories are hitting me hard right now. I am marching steadily towards the anniversaries of those traumatic days, and I feel them coming like a freight train. Each day I can remember with more precision what we were doing last year, because they were his last days with us. How crazy to think we had no idea. But again, how glad I am for his sake that we had no idea.

Pain

“On November 7th 2015, almost a year to Aaron’s deathaversary, I woke up so stiff and sore I couldn’t even move my head and glancing through my diary from that day one year earlier I saw that I had found Aaron alone on the floor of the bathroom after coming home from the gym………. it was a year later and my body remembered this… It remembered all of the horror to follow and it was bracing me to lose Aaron again.” – Nora McInerny

The above quote is from my absolute favorite widow, Nora McInerny. That’s saying something because its an elite club… Katie Couric, who is a “sister” of mine through Tri Delta, and Sheryl Sandberg who I adore… add to the list so many widows I’ve now met in real life through the support group I did, and the Hot Young Widows Club. Nora said this in the Podcast Terrible Thanks for asking – the Chapter 2 episode, which is likely also my favorite episode.

I have definitely read that loss and grief can manifest into real, true physical pain. I think if I’d read that a year ago, I’d have believed it… but with some skepticism. Like… is that really a thing?

It manifests itself differently in everyone. In all sorts of different ways. For me, it was this incredible upper back, neck, back of my head excruciating pain. Pain so bad that only consistent heat and ibuprofen could make me functional. This started slowly, almost without me realizing it right after Tim died. And took a long time to go away.

This week, that pain is back with a vengeance. I suspect it started due to my dad being admitted to the ICU on Sunday. Even just that word – ICU… all the memories it brings back. I can’t seem to quite get the pain in check yet. And I realize I probably just have to manage it the best I can through the coming weeks/months.

I write this not for an answer, a fix, or even for any sympathy. But simply as someone who might have previously been a skeptic to put down in writing: I am here to tell you its real. It’s definitely a thing. The physical pain that can be manifested in the aftermath of trauma is absolutely a thing. My body is remembering this time last year… the horror to follow, and is bracing me to lose Tim again.

Milestones

April, May, June. They feel big. Full of big milestones. Full of firsts. Full of anniversaries of lasts. And then I start year two. Year two which everyone says is worse than year one. Which I get. I get it – people expect you to be ok now. You’ve already experienced the first one of those without him, so… you’re ok now, right? Or, you’ve moved on. Even when you see us moving forward, my friends, we do not “move on” from this kind of loss. I will carry this loss with me… I will carry Tim with me. Always.

April came crashing in with Easter. Easter was April 1st this year. I planned big Easter bunny plans. No family was going to be in town, so I made other plans and had a big, busy, exhausting weekend. Which was wonderful. And then I had a moment when I took out the trash and I saw cardinals in the trees and I burst into tears. These are just moments I have. And Easter night was… interesting. A story for a later post. But April came in with a bang.

April 4th would have been Tim’s 38th birthday. I took the day off. I knew I’d need it. I made an appointment at a friend of A’s mother’s tattoo shop. I’d been considering this tattoo a while and knew I wanted it, and felt his birthday was the right day for it. The day he should have turned 38. But he did not. Because he will forever be 37 years old. I also bought orange star balloons and a Happy Birthday balloon at the dollar store. And I made a cake. With orange frosting. I planned to make red velvet but both girls asked me not to. I drove out to Veramar to pick up my wine and sit on the bench I bought him there. I put candles on the cake and sang with the kids, and we wrote on the balloons, and went outside and let them go. During the cake, R said, “I wish Daddy could come back.” I do too, my love. I do too. As the balloons drifted out of sight A shouted “I love you, daddy!!” Handling their grief and my own is often overwhelming.

The tattoo I got is his signature from my last Valentine’s Day card in 2017.

A friend asked me on April 5th if I’d get any more tattoos. He didn’t know this was my second. I don’t know. Maybe. Probably. When I got the first, I thought it could be my only. Maybe. But I’d be open. Tim wanted to get one involving the kids. But he never formulated exactly what he wanted. This one came to me easily. I asked one colleague what he thought about its relative visibility regarding professionalism, really just out of curiosity. Nothing was going to change my mind. He told me his wife advised against it for professional reasons. I get it. I would have done the same, a year ago. But it was too obvious to me that this was something I had to do. I didn’t want it on my wrist where it was very easily visible… but this seemed the right place.

All the decisions I’ve made lately are challenging. But I do my best to always do what seems like the right place… or what simply feels right. I’ve gone with my gut most lately.

On Thursday night, we celebrated our dog’s birthday. His adoption day really. 10 years since when Tim and I took him home. Tim loved that dog so much. He was really our first baby. When I started traveling for work a lot in 2008-09, Tim started letting him sleep in our bed and getting on the couch! In 2015, my in-laws took him for the summer while we prepped and sold our condo, bought and moved into our current home… Tim told me he thought maybe we should leave him in New York… because it would be so hard on all of us when he dies! He was literally afraid of the grief we would all experience when our dog inevitably dies. I can’t believe our dog outlived him. That fact was not lost on me as we celebrated the dog’s “birthday” on Thursday. I felt the loss.

This past weekend, I took off Friday. I took my son to get ear tubes. I was constantly reminded that Tim would have been there for that. Forms and people asked me where Tim was… who else was coming… there was a little boy (older than D) who got out of surgery just after he did who had something done on his eyes who was really hysterical. His dad was called back and I swear they asked him a half-dozen times about Mom. I was close to saying “He said she’s not here!!!” English wasn’t this family’s first language, and I know there could have been a million reasons this poor child’s mother was not there, but my heart went out to this boy and his father in such a big way. D was a trooper, and yet, doing this without Tim felt big. I felt the loss. I then went to R’s classroom to celebrate her 5th birthday. Something we had done together last year. I then took R to Kindergarten Orientation… which I attended 2 years ago with Tim, on a day where I had an ultrasound (that he also went to with me) in the morning. I felt the loss… that he wasn’t there… for R and for me. I also had a 5th birthday extravaganza at my house on Saturday… and bought her a big gift, that nearly wasn’t ready on time… and pretty much emotionally shut down at that point. It all just became too much and my brain shut down. My sister and my sister-in-law and my two college friends who flew in for the event took over, and simply did. And everything got done. And I think R had fun. All the kids had fun. That night, my father-in-law took A to the father-daughter dance with her girl scout troop. It was lovely. Beautiful. And yet what Tim wouldn’t have given to go to that with his girl? And I felt the loss.

I guess the point is that it’s impossible not to feel the loss in the big milestones. Sometimes its crippling. Sometimes less so. But its unavoidable. All I can do is let myself feel it. Feel the loss. And try to feel less of the guilt.

“Only people who are capable of loving strongly can also suffer great sorrow, but this same necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heals them” – Leo Tolstoy

Annual Tim Gaige Memorial Event

I’ve had some time to think about this. I really want to have an annual event we can do as a family to remember Tim, and to bring together those who loved him to remember him in a very Tim-way for the kids. I want to do it in June… because he died in June and because of Father’s day, since being a father was his absolute favorite thing. Something we often did for Father’s day was go to a Potomac Nationals game. Tim loved them even more than going to MLB games in a way, and they were a perfect family activity. We even went pre-kids. So I decided on that as a memorial event pretty much as soon as I thought of it. Here is a picture of us in 2016 at a Potomac Nationals game, after Tim snuck to the gift shop and came back with hats for all 4 of us! D is in this photo in utero. #partyoffive

After deciding on the type of event, the questions were in arrangements, and what organization to benefit. Tim was passionate about many, many things. Everyone who knew him could attest to that. I already had sports covered, but the absolute # 1 thing(s) Tim was passionate about above all were his crazy ambitious wife and their “three unique and amazing children”. (That’s a direct Tim quote from the Mother’s day card he gave me 2 days before we last spoke in the ICU.) I don’t say that to self-promote, but because it was unequivocally true.

I considered medical research organizations, cancer societies, the ACLU, NPR, and many other worthy organizations that Tim either supported directly in life or would tie to his untimely death. But I was brought back to his wife and children as his passion. He would have been so incredibly touched by how our community rallied around his wife and children during his illness and incredibly untimely passing. He would have been overwhelmed and so moved by it. I have also learned that not everyone experiences that family and community support that I received. And that’s where I want to be able to give back. So, I decided on Together Rising, an organization that came about from a blog I used to follow called Momastery. I remember lying in bed with my phone or laptop a time or two and reading to Tim out loud a particular quote or paragraph or blogpost that Glennon Doyle had written in Momastery that really spoke to me. I remember it was he that came and told me that she was marrying Abby Wambach. Because 1) he always had all the latest in pop culture (I feel so bad the kids are stuck with me on that front) and 2) he had such incredible respect for Abby and the entire US Women’s National Team. Aaaaand there we are back to sports.

I just had to reach out to see if they were on board with partnering with me. And they were amazing! Got RIGHT back to me, had good ideas, called me Warrior Mama (and there’s no way they even know about my Warrior Tim post, I’m guessing that’s more a nod to Love Warrior or Carry On, Warrior books) and made my heart happy. So then I reached out to the Potomac Nationals and they were also very helpful in arranging the date and the setup.

So here are the important facts. SAVE THE DATE.

The Game will be the day before Father’s Day, Saturday June 16, 2018 at 6:35pm vs Buies Creek.

I believe the game will also be a military appreciation night, which I am delighted about, and I think they will both have fireworks after the game, and let the kids run the bases.

Individual ticket sales start on Monday, March 19th, and I hope to have an online portal set up by then that I can share and let people buy tickets to the game, where up to half of the ticket value goes to Together Rising.

Fun fact: 100% of what Together Rising receives from every personal donation goes directly to an individual, family, or cause in need – not one penny we receive from individual donation goes to administration costs, unless a donor specifically authorizes that use. (From: https://togetherrising.org/)

So put June 16th on your calendar. Plan to come enjoy a fun, family-friendly baseball game, and raise your glass (or more likely cup) to Tim Gaige. And while doing so, give a little back to the community, and good folks in need.

Update: tickets on sale!

http://pn1.glitnirticketing.com/pnticket/web/logingroup1.php?&refresh=1521495331

Password: gaige

Update #2:

Some asked how they might pay tribute / honor Tim if they could not make it in town that weekend for the game. Here’s how you can do that!

https://app.mobilecause.com/vf/GaigeFund

Update # 3:

Some who are visiting from out of town have asked about accommodations close to the stadium, and honestly there aren’t any SUPER close, and I haven’t’ been able to find anyone who could give me any sort of recommendation either way, about the closest ones along I95. So I thought I would share the info we shared last summer for the Celebration of Life. These are in Fairfax, and the prices listed were researched last June (2017). I feel like if you are coming all the way out of town for Tim’s celebration of life, you might like the additional opportunity to see his children that weekend. For any other questions/ concerns / suggestions, please feel free to reach out to me.

Residence Inn Fairfax City for $89.00 USD per night (either King or Double)

3565 Chain Bridge Road, Fairfax, VA 22030 Central Reservations: 877-399-6027

Hampton Fairfax for $99.00 USD per night (either King or Double)

10860 Fairfax Boulevard, Fairfax, VA 22030 Reservations: 703-385-2600 Go to: fairfaxcity.hamptoninn.com

Springhill Suites Fairfax Fair Oaks for King room: $99.00 USD per night / for Queen Suite: $109.00 USD per night

11191 Waples Mill Rd., Fairfax, VA 22030 Reservations: 703-691-7880

Terrible, thanks for asking – Perfectly

I’ve mentioned before in my What Grief looks like post how much I love the podcast American Public Media Podcast “Terrible, thanks for asking” with Nora McInerny, Yesterday, they put out a new episode and it hit home to me in such a profound way.

While I was at the hospital, the infectious disease physician was one I often really liked to see. She seemed to understand what I was thinking sometimes, even when I couldn’t say it. I asked a LOT of questions. She felt my guilt over whether I should have gotten him in earlier. She told me that she was a physician, her husband was a physician, and she doesn’t think she would have brought him as early as I did. That was immeasurably comforting and yet… a part of you has to wonder if that’s true. That same physician described to me what happened to Tim as a “perfect storm” of negative occurrences with a disastrous outcome.

And here was a story about a woman who’s life fell apart suddenly very similarly to mine… a woman who’s husband had a very similar set of circumstances also come together “perfectly” and lead to his death. His death, essentially from sepsis, on the table in her ER.,, because she was an ER doctor! I can’t imagine it happening at your work. And yet, on the whole, I can imagine, I lived it. And her guilt over whether she brought him in sooner… but she and I could have easily traded places for any of it, She even talked about being jealous of a family who got the chance to prepare for the end.

And I certainly get that.

The emotions in all of this are so complex. Some days, I think I’n doing great. And then a song, or a memory, or an issue with a kiddo – or a podcast – will bring the pain and the loss to the surface. And all I can do is sit in it for a while.

“Numbing the pain for a while will make it worse when you finally feel it.” Albus Dumbledore through J.K. Rowling

This is us – Jack’s death

Last year I wrote a bit about the TV show This is us.

Spolier alert: Not appropriate to read if you have yet to watch the 2/4 episode of This is US.

Sunday night, after the Superbowl, it was the episode where you finally find out / see how Jack dies. Tim had asked me over and over when I watched the first season, “do you know how the dad dies yet?” The show was too much for him, too intense. It’s amazing to me to see this same anxiety in his daughter. I took the girls to the secondary school’s “The Little Mermaid” on Sunday, and in the “awkward” love scene parts A asked me if we could leave… then at the end told me it was so amazing, and I was the best mom ever for taking them! Just like her father, she could not handle awkward, or anxiety, and uncertainty.

Jack’s death was harder than I expected. I mean, I’ve known for 2 years that he will die. But it’s TV, I expected it to happen dramatically: in a car crash, somehow related to his drinking… even when I knew it was a fire, I thought for sure there was a connection. But no. He was a hero in the fire and survived it. And then. He died a very ordinary death. The heart. The lungs. The widow maker heart attack. The last conversation with his wife: joking, teasing, ordinary. In the hospital where his son was born. (and daughter)

I wrote before about not making comparisons. All of our bad stuff is bad, we don’t have to say what’s better or worse. And yet, I think it’s only human nature to “blink” – make those snap judgments, and feel that quick comparison. It’s what I felt when I watched This is us. There were so many similarities. And the differences were/are up and down. The ages of the kids.. pros and cons… the suddenness.. pros and cons. But at the end of the day, it’s still dealing with the loss, and being strong for the kids. Being able to tell the kids… knowing the right things to say. And being able to feel all the pain of it.

Someone in my hot young widows club posted about the struggle of seeing people post about how hard it is for them to suffer TV characters’ deaths. About how we live devastation every day, we don’t just watch it once a week. And I get that point of view, I really do. Mine though is usually along these lines… when people tell me they’ve never experienced a devastating loss… or even that their children haven’t.. my first thought is, with all sincerity “good for you!” I’m really just so happy that the most difficult loss they’e had is Jack, from This is us. And I am grateful to the show for making people feel all the feels. This episode was surprisingly difficult. But necessary for me.

“…Take the sourest lemon that life has to offer… and turn it into something resembling lemonade.” ~ This is US

Photograph in Music (Alternate title: I’m not Dead)

I am falling behind. I have a hundred blog posts in my head and half started, but this one was longing to be written.

This weekend I officially joined a fitness place, and went to a class Saturday morning. I like it because the music is good and motivating and they tell you what to do constantly so you don’t have to think. During the floor exercises, when I was lifting weights I saw myself in the mirror, and somehow in the combination of music, adrenaline, and tingling of my soft muscles that had gone unused basically since November, I looked myself right in the eye and thought, “You are not dead.” “I’m not dead.”

I felt like a piece of me, half of me, sometimes more, died last June. In my post 6 months, an open letter to my love, I mention that sometimes I feel Tim would be disappointed in me. I don’t think he’d be disappointed in me when I do what I have to do to heal, or to survive, when I allow the kids more screen time than I ever would have “before,” but I think he’d be disappointed in me when I do more of the holding on, the feeling sorry for myself, the wallowing.

Tim had a complicated relationship with death. I believe now it was mostly a result of not ever experiencing it up really close. I think he was mostly afraid of it. Having experienced it up really close, as close as it gets, I can say there is a beauty in the sadness. This is something I’ve heard from other widows too. Living up close to death seems to be the only thing that can truly rid us of our fear of it.

But it is a challenge to always look at the positive, look for the good, find the silver lining. When I hold on too much, is when I think Tim would be disappointed. When I do things for other people, or for appearances. He always hated that. He’d tell me if he could to keep living. He’d tell me that I don’t have to wait a certain amount of time for anything; that there is no formula; that weeks, months, years from now, he will still be dead. He’d tell me: Don’t miss out on anything today because you are simply missing me and feeling sorry for yourself.

I can both love Tim, and be alive. I can stretch, strain, and push all my muscles. I am reminded of this in music. And I felt like it was a nudge from Tim that gave me that thought. It may seem overwhelming how much life I have left without him. But I have it. I have to accept that. I am not dead. And there is great beauty in that if I can find it. And live it.

My sister-in-law asked me after Tim died if I hear every song differently now, and I really do. Every love song has a different kind of meaning by me ears. All of them.

I really love Ed Sheeran’s song Photograph, and when I heard it the first time after Tim died, I heard it with new ears, and it resounded with me in many ways.

Loving can hurt, loving can hurt sometimes
But it’s the only thing that I know
When it gets hard, you know it can get hard sometimes
It is the only thing that makes us feel alive

We keep this love in a photograph
We made these memories for ourselves
Where our eyes are never closing
Hearts are never broken
And time’s forever frozen still

So you can keep me
Inside the pocket of your ripped jeans
Holding me closer ’til our eyes meet
You won’t ever be alone, wait for me to come home

Loving can heal, loving can mend your soul
And it’s the only thing that I know, know
I swear it will get easier,
Remember that with every piece of you
Hm, and it’s the only thing we take with us when we die….

~ Ed Sheeran, Photograph

If love is the only currency we take with us when we die, then Tim died an incredibly rich man. He lived big, and loved big and openly, and people loved him back. So many of us loved him. He loved life. And life loved him. He took so much love with him when he died.

I can only try to live my life so that I can be as rich on the day I die.

New Year’s Day

I survived 2017. What more can I say?

Tim did not.

It’s true, I feel like half of me died last summer. However, my heart is still beating. Kidneys, lungs, all of it. And tiny humans still need me. There are all the logistics. There is the world that just keeps spinning, 24 hours after another. Relentless.

Some days, the amount of life I have left seems daunting. All of the days and the weeks and the months and the years that I have to live without him. That just simply was not the plan.

I survived Christmas, somehow. Well, with family, with a lot of support. That is how I survived Christmas.

New Year’s brought me great anxiety. Both eager anticipation to get the heck out of 2017… and the realization that with the end of 2017, came the end of the last year Tim ever saw. The last year that ever knew Tim.

My solution? Invite around 30 people to my house to provide distraction. That worked, but then this morning, I felt the deep sadness welling up. The kind of sadness so deep and powerful that the only way to deal with it really would be to cry and sleep all day. That, of course, was not an option, so I was infinitely grateful that I had been invited to my first ever in-person get together of the DC area members of the Hot Young Widows Club. I took the kids and truthfully it was a lifesaver to have something to do, around people who just simply get it. And the power in the girls realizing that all of the other kids there had dead dads too. And meeting a widow my age live and in person for the first time ever. It turned out to be the exact medicine I needed.

My goal for 2018 is to find a balance between the sadness and hope for the future. I want the kids to hear all the stories about their dad, to hear his name, to feel him in their hearts. But I also want to do whatever I can for myself to avoid them living with a sad sack until they go to college. I don’t know how to find that balance, but I have to believe there is always hope, and that I can find it.

Don’t read the last page
But I stay when it’s hard or it’s wrong or we’re making mistakes
I want your midnights
But I’ll be cleaning up bottles with you on New Year’s Day

Hold on to the memories, they will hold on to you
Hold on to the memories, they will hold on to you
Hold on to the memories, they will hold on to you
And I will hold on to you

~T. Swift, New Year’s Day