One Hundred and Eighty Days

So it has been 180 days since I lost Bride.  I cannot even fit that in my head.  Like most significant events in my life, it seems like yesterday and it seems like a hundred years ago.  I remember making the decision early that I was not going to make any big decisions for at least the first six months.  Well, here we are and I feel like I have made a million decisions and at the same time, I feel like I’ve made none.  It’s weird how our brain works like that.

I think there is one decision I have made, it just does not have a timeline yet.  That decision is that Nebraska will not be my final destination.  I like it here, don’t get me wrong.  There are still more things for me to see that I have never seen before.  And at the same time, it is too far from any large body of water.  In fact, Nebraska is the only triple landlocked state in the United States.  Meaning to reach an ocean or open sea, you must cross at least three different states or international border to get to water.

The ocean is very important to me.  It has too many restorative powers.  It brings peace to my soul that a river, stream or lake simply cannot.  I don’t know where that comes from, but I suspect it comes from my days in the Navy.  Sitting on the fantail in the middle of the night, in the middle of the ocean, is something that has to be experienced to believe.  So, not a permanent location, just don’t know when this part of the adventure will draw to an end.

Maybe that is one of the things that has changed in these 180 days.  Somewhere along the way I started thinking about an adventure again.  That feels strange to even type.  I haven’t posted here for a few weeks.  It isn’t because I haven’t been writing.  Quite the opposite.  I have probably written more in the last month or so than I have in years.  I just don’t know how much of it belongs here yet.

I started working on something that may someday become a book.  A couple of dear friends are helping me determine if it is or not.  I don’t want to get too far into that here, mostly because I am still figuring out what the hell it is myself.  What started as writing about losing Bride has slowly become something else.  I’ve found myself writing less about death and grief and more about the life that is still showing up every morning and sitting with me while I have my coffee.  And that has led me to some uncomfortable territory.

What do I still want?  Where do I belong?  What am I looking forward to?  What parts of me survived April 21^st am I still discovering?  I don’t have particularly good answers to any of those questions, or any others one really.  Six months ago, I was not even capable of asking them.  Maybe that is what feels different after 180 days have passed.

For a while, surviving was all I could do.  Get through today.  Then tomorrow.  Then the day after that. Figure out how to be ok coming home an empty house, other than Dogbert.  Learning how to make dinner for one.  Learning how to sleep in our room, even though it was a different bed.  Learning how to carry a life that suddenly had an enormous Bride shaped hole in the middle of it.  And somehow, somewhere in there something began to shift. 

I still miss her EVERY DAMN DAY.  There are still moments when the reality of her being gone lands with enough force to make my knees weak.  And now there are also moments when I catch myself wondering what comes next for me, myself and I.  I used to feel a bit of guilt about that.  Sometimes I still do.  I am driven forward by the fact that I am 100% sure that Bride would not want me to get stuck here, figuratively, not physically.   

It is so fucking hard.  Because imagining a future can feel dangerously close to moving on.  And I have absolutely zero interest in moving on from Bride.  What I am beginning to understand is that maybe those aren’t the same thing.  Maybe carrying her with me and continuing to build a life aren’t in conflict with each other.  Maybe, just maybe, they are the next bit of work. 

And maybe that curiosity is the biggest change I can see in myself right now.  I have started wanting things again.  Nothing particularly grand.  I want to learn new things that I don’t know how to do.  I want to take something apart that I’ve never taken apart and see if I can get them back together.  I want to travel to places I have never been.  I want to spend time with people I care about.  I want more mornings that make me wonder what the day might bring instead of just wondering how I am going to get through it.   

None of that fixes anything.  It certainly does not make me miss Bride any less.  Maybe that is another thing I am learning.  Missing her and wanting my life can apparently occupy the same space.  Grief doesn’t have to leave the room before curiosity is allowed back in.  I’m not sure I understood that before.  Hell, I’m not 100% sure I completely understand it now.

There are still moments when I want to text or call her, it’s why I haven’t turned her cell phone off yet.  When I see something ridiculous my first instinct is to let her know, and for a fraction of a second my heart forgets what the rest of me already knows.  Those moments hurt like hell.  And strangely, I don’t want them to stop completely.  I like that she is still instinctually  the person my brain reaches for first.  

I don’t have any idea where that life eventually takes me.  Apparently, it’s somewhere closer to an ocean.  Beyond that, the map still seems pretty damn fuzzy.  For the first time in a while though, I am curious about where it might lead.  And 180 days ago, I could not have imagined myself saying that or even allowing myself to think that.  

Our Futures Are Not Guaranteed

Recently I was sitting by Smith River in Oregon pondering on the getting older bit and the future we all paint in our minds.  Not one of us knows for sure how our story ends, and I suspect all of us carry around a draft version of it, the story we tell ourselves about what the future holds.  The picture of who will be chasing who in their wheelchairs.  What holidays and special occasions will look like.  Who we’ll call when something amazing happens, and who we’ll call when something goes straight to shit.  These are not things we generally write down.  Most of the time, I don’t even think we are aware we’re making them.  They are just there, below the surface, quietly becoming part of how we think the future will work.

Losing my Beautiful Bride shattered a lot of assumptions I held as unassailable truths.  The obvious one was losing her.  The less obvious one was losing the future I had built in my head around her being there for it.  I am not typing about some detailed 20 year plan backed up with a strategy document.  We didn’t have that, most folks don’t have that.  And if they do, I am questioning the sanity of that.  If we were to boil our plan all the way down to its essence, we simply had the expectation that whatever came next, we’d figure out that shit together, just like we figured everything else out.

I am realizing I not grieving a future that has been taken away from me.  I am grieving a future that never actually existed outside my own damn head.  Talk about getting stuck in your head, holy shit, what a realization.  The point being, all futures are imaginary, until they get here.  We cannot know what tomorrow will bring.  Hell, we can’t really even know what the next hour or next few minutes brings.  The strange thing is that most of us understand that intellectually and then proceed like it isn’t true.  A classic case of ostrich with its head in the sand.

We all make plans.   We tell ourselves story after story about how things are going to play out.  We picture retirement.  We picture anniversaries.  We picture who will be beside us when all of our hair is gone and strange noises start happening every time we get up.  And we picture all sorts of things that have yet to happen.  And none of that is wrong.  I think it is just part of being human.  We are wired to imagine what could be or will be. 

Maybe starting with possibilities is what all of us do.  Then slowly, over years and decades, they stop feeling like possibilities and start feeling like how the story is supposed to go.  Right up until life hits us with a harsh reality check.  Somewhere along the way, I quit thinking of my future with Sandy as one possible version of our story and started thinking it was the story.  That is a hell of thing to realize.  And once I saw that, I started wondering where else have I done the same thing.  Turns out, there are probably more places than I care to admit and that feels like something to work on. 

Over the last few months, I’ve started to suspect this isn’t just a widowhood lesson.  That happens to be how I learned it, but I don’t think it has exclusive rights to that.  I guess eventually everyone discovers they have been carrying around in their head a future that just doesn’t’ ever show up.  Sometimes that could be a marriage that didn’t work.  Sometimes it’s a stalled career or a dream that never materializes.  Sometimes it could be a dream that turns out to look nothing like the mental picture you’ve been carrying around.  Life is like an editor, always tinkering with the manuscript, without asking permission or even letting us know about the changes.

Sitting beside Smith River, I found myself wondering if maybe wisdom has less to do with predicting the future and more to do with holding it lightly.  We can dream about it, plan for it, even hope for it.  We just cannot confuse it with a promise.  Tomorrow is never a signed contract for any of us.  Losing someone teaches that lesson in the harshest way possible.   For a long time that realization felt depressing.  If the future isn’t guaranteed, if the story in my head isn’t necessarily the story I am going to get, what am I supposed to do with that?

The more I pondered, the more I started to wonder if maybe the answer wasn’t to stop dreaming about tomorrow.  The answer might just be as simple as not treating those dreams like they are a certainty.  The future I imagined with Sandy was one I looked forward to.  I still miss it and I probably always will.  At the same time, sitting there listening to the water go by, I can see something I couldn’t see years ago.  Just because that future never arrived doesn’t mean there aren’t other futures that are simply waiting for me to arrive in them.  Different ones, unexpected ones, and futures I can’t even imagine because they haven’t rolled into view, yet. 

And maybe that is where the lesson has been hiding.  We are supposed to make plans, we are built to be dreamers.  We were supposed to draw a picture of what might be waiting around the next corner.  We just have to remember that those pictures are sketches, not blueprints.  The future has never been guaranteed to any of us.  And maybe, just maybe, that isn’t a reason to fear what’s next, even when we have NO FUCKING IDEA what it might be.

Maybe we just have to be courageous enough to stay curious as hell about it.