Growing Older

The song Slowly popped into my playlist the other day, it’s about slowly growing older.  Nobody wakes up old.  It happens to us one ordinary day at a time.  We tend to spend most of our life planning for tomorrow and rarely notice it quietly rolling in.  When we are younger, growing older feels additive.  New experiences, new friends, new responsibilities, and more stories to tell.  Lately, I’ve realized growing older alone feels a little different.  It feels more like carrying those things that were once new.  For almost four decades I wasn’t growing older, we were growing older.  And I am learning, there is a difference.

Sandy and I had a shared vision of old age that included chasing each other around the nursing home in our wheelchairs.  We would joke about that often.  I am not sure at what point those jokes stopped being jokes and became the future I expected.  The version of older age I am living is different than either of us ever imagined.  Grief didn’t show up all at once, and neither has healing.  Both seem to be arriving the same way as old age, slowly.

I have touched on this before, but losing a spouse is bigger than just losing your person.  You also lose the version of the future that you’d been quietly building together.  I guess I took for granted what growing older might look like.  It had always looked like the two of us, the Smith’s.  And it was good to be a Smith.  It meant never wondering who was sitting in the control chair, who was riding shotgun in the Galaxie or who was holding my hand when life got hard.  It looked like a lifetime’s worth of inside jokes, funny stories, familiar routines and two people carrying the same history.  I guess somewhere along the way, the future Sandy and I imagined stopped feeling like a possibility and started feeling like the way the rest of our life would unfold.  I never considered a version that did not include Bride.   

What has surprised me over the last 143 days is that life has not stopped arriving.  New conversations kept happening, friendships kept deepening, and new memories kept on finding ways to be made.  What I didn’t understand at first was why that surprised me so much.  If you’d asked me a year ago what old age looked like, I would have described a life built around the two of us. 

When Sandy died, that future disappeared with her, or at least I thought it did.  For a while, I thought losing that future meant losing my future.  Over the last several months, life has  continued on, with little regard for how I happen to be feeling about it.  The future I expected is gone.  There is no use in pretending otherwise.  Some days I still catch myself reaching for pieces that will never be.  At the same time, another future has continued to show up whether I was ready for it or not.  Understanding that has been difficult because, truth be told, I haven’t fully accepted it.  Regardless of how many times I have heard “life goes on” I was just not prepared for the harsh reality of what that means after losing her.

Somewhere along the way, I realized I might be asking the wrong question.  Maybe the question isn’t, “how do I get back the future I lost?”  I can’t get that back.  That future belonged to us, and I now I am just me, myself, and I.  It seems the question now should be, “what do I do with this future that refuses to stop showing up?”  That one is still very much a work in progress.  I am beginning to think the answer starts with saying yes to people who keep showing up for me.  The friends who call, the ones who visit, the friends who will sit through the laughter and the tears.  The ones who keep proving I am not nearly alone as I once thought. 

What I understand now is that the story didn’t end when that future did.  The last several months have been filled with people who have refused to let me walk this road by myself.  Friends who showed up, friends who figured out how to show up for me, friends who sat with me when neither of us really knew what to say or how to say it.  In a strange, or maybe not so strange way, they have become part of this new future I had not planned for and never saw coming.  Not replacing anything, not substituting anything.  Just something different altogether.

Today, I think I would describe it differently.  I’d describe it as a collection of chosen and actual family choosing, again and again, to walk beside each other for a while.  To be clear, this is not the future I planned.  This is simply the future that arrived.  Different than the one we imagined.  And just like old age, just like grief, and just like healing, it seems to be arriving one ordinary day at a time.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Smithlandia

Smithlandia was never really a destination for us.  It was just a place where life happened.  When we moved in 10 years ago, it felt like the name was waiting for us there amongst the cedars and doug firs.  We hauled all manner of things back that 3/8^th of a mile gravel driveway.  Groceries, plants, lumber for projects and old car parts.  We had all manner of things delivered, from UPS, USPS, FedEx and others.  It became our house right away.  Then, over time and a thousand ordinary days, it became our home.  Eventually, it became fully Smithlandia.

This week I carried a part of Sandy back there.  I dropped some of her ashes into Smith River, or Cedar Creek if you wanna listen what the county calls it.  We always called it Smith River.  That got me to wondering, what does it really mean to leave a part of someone in a place where they had already left so much of themselves? 

As her ashes hit the water, they swirled for a moment and then disappeared.  I was expecting the moment to feel larger somehow than it did in the few seconds it took.  More final maybe, or maybe more significant.  Instead, what struck me was how quickly they were gone.  Within seconds the current carried them away, and as they say, that was that.  Except it wasn’t. 

Standing there, I realized I had been thinking about this all wrong.  I thought the ashes were the thing I was bringing back to Smithlandia.  Watching them disappear made me realize that Smithlandia was already full of her.  Not necessarily in big dramatic moments, although there were some of those.  I am talking about the ordinary moments.  She was there in the driveway that we traveled thousands of times.  She was in the flowers.  She was in the projects, including the bridge replacement.  She was in every story, forever connected to every corner of every acre of this place.  I used to think places were sacred because something important happened there.  I wonder if maybe it has more to do with the life that accumulated over time.

After the ashes were gone, I kneeled there for a moment, water coming out of my eyeballs, and before I could pull myself back together, Jack’s hand landed on my shoulder.  No speech. No profound observation.  Just the two of us on a bridge of our own making, listening to Smith River do what it has always done.  Jack could not make this moment easier.  He couldn’t bring Sandy back.  He couldn’t fix anything.  What he could do was stand there with me.  Just the right person showing up at exactly the moment I needed him.  And sometimes, that is what love looks like.

It occurred to me a bit later that maybe this was part of what I had been discovering all afternoon.  Smithlandia wasn’t the only thing carrying traces of Sandy.  Jack was too.  So were the friends who sat on the ponder porch with us over the years.  So were the people who helped us build projects, celebrate victories, and weather hard seasons.  Smith River wasn’t the only place her life left a mark.  Sandy left a mark on Smithlandia, and on those who knew and loved her and shared that chapter of our lives.

Maybe that’s what all of us do if we’re lucky. 

We leave little pieces of ourselves behind in the places we love and in the people we share them with.

A bit later I found myself pondering one question in particular.  What exactly did I leave there this afternoon?  Not her.  The ashes, sure.  But those weren’t Sandy.  Sandy is still in the stories of that place.  She’s in the memory of hauling groceries and car parts up that gravel driveway.  She’s in the bridge we rebuilt ourselves.  She’s in the flowers.  And she’s in the house that slowly became Smithlandia.  She’s also in the people who shared that chapter of life with us.  She’s in the stories we still tell.  She’s in the lessons we learned along the way. 

Standing on the bridge over Smith River, I watched the ashes float away and realized the only part of Sandy I could lose sight of was the part I had just dropped into the water.  The rest of her remained exactly where it had always been.  In the place.  In the people.  In the stories.  She was everywhere I looked.  The physical evidence washed away.  The traces of love, it turns out, are indelible stains.

Sometimes It Shows Up As Presence

For pretty much all of my life, I’ve been the fixer of things.  The guy folks call when things ain’t working.  The guy who figures things out.   Restoring broken things has always been a hobby of mine.  I have restored old cars, old tools, rebuilt old grills and other things like that.  I have built a career on the back of fixing gadgets, high power radar systems, TV transmitters, computers, and all sorts of electronics.   I’ve spent just as much time fixing processes and workflows, growing teams, and chipping away at workplace cultures that create unnecessary stress and frustration.  I consider myself a fixer of many things.

I try very hard to put as much effort into fixing myself as well.   Using therapists, executive leadership and life coaches, as well as many mentors over the years.  All of those have required a lot of deep diving into who I am and how I can be a better version of me tomorrow than I am today.  I have made it part of who I am, to show up for those who are important to me.  I think this was never more true than it was for Bride, through her addition, and recovery journey as well as through her journey after the bipolar diagnosis.  Showing up almost became a reaction, and almost a response and the truth is it is probably somewhere between those two.

I was led to believe early in life that strength meant handling my own problems and not becoming a burden to others.  That is why I put in the work on myself, trying to be strong enough to carry my own load.  And then one day, life handed me something that was just too fucking heavy for me to carry by myself.  When Sandy died, the outpouring of support was overwhelming, and still is in many ways.  The texts, the random uber eats meal showing up, the daily check ins, the friends who call and sit with me in discomfort because none of us know how to talk about any of it.  And even the readers of this blog, all showed up.  I didn’t even have to ask, y’all just showed up for me in all the ways I needed someone to show up.

For me, and I suspect others, giving of ourselves feels comfortable.  It is a muscle I have built for those hard moments chosen and real family need support.  Receiving help, at least for me, makes me feel vulnerable and uncomfortable.  That is not necessarily a bad thing, it is just not something I am used to, not a muscle I have built up.  That got me to wondering, why does accepting help make me uncomfortable?  Why did I feel like I should be able to manage this on my own?  Why did every act of kindness feel like a debt I had to repay.  Was there some deep need to carry an invisible ledger, like there was to be some reconciliation at some future point by some unknown thing or person? 

I found thinking about this was weird and make me feel odd.  Was there some need to pay this back?  Or some feeling of indebtedness?  Or did I just not want to inconvenience anyone.  I know that no one is keeping a ledger, or somehow calculating the “cost” of friendship with me.  It is a silly premise, never once in my whole life have I thought about that when supporting those I love.  I kept coming back to what the fuck, where is that completely illogical bullshit  coming from?  

The longer I sat with that, the more I realized that my discomfort wasn’t about anyone owing anything.  I am beginning to think it is about identity.   Somewhere along the way, I started tying strength to independence.  I knew who I was when I was the one bringing the meal.  I knew who I was when I was working on the problem.  I knew who I was when I was carrying the weight.  I wasn’t nearly as sure who I was when I was the one needing help.  I doubt I am the only one who has ever felt this way.  I suspect a lot of folks who spend time taking care of others learn some version of that same lesson.  Strength meant managing problems.  Strength meant not asking for much.  Strength meant making sure everyone else was ok before worrying about myself.

That mindset worked well for me for most of my life, or at least I think it did.  Then life handed me the biggest load of shit to date.  Somewhere in the back of my mind, accepting help felt too much like admitting I couldn’t handle it.  Like needing help and failing were somehow the same thing.  That’s where I think I had it wrong.  Maybe it is really not as complicated as my over revving engineer brain is making it.  I am pretty durn sure that the people helping me are not trying to solve anything at all.  I am pretty sure they are simply trying to love me in the best way they know how.  Maybe receiving help isn’t about accepting what someone can do for me.  It is really about me allowing people who care about me a way to express that love in ways that don’t require awkward words to fix what hurts.  I don’t think I was ready for that at the beginning.  I know how to be the one showing up, or at least I thought I did.  I am still learning how to let others show up for me. 

As I write this, I am sitting in a kitchen in a small town outside Fresno visiting a dear friend, actually one of the oldest friends Sandy and I had.  The three of us met back in 1988 when we were all stationed in Annapolis.  She invited me out to hang out with her and her family,  and I came.  There has not been some grand moment of wisdom, no profound speech, no attempt to fix anything.  We’ve talked, we’ve laughed, we’ve shared memories and we’ve sat in comfortable silence.  Mostly she has simply been present.  And I’ve realized that presence may be one of the purest forms of love there is. 

From here I’m headed to Oregon to see another dear friend whose Bride is currently in hospice care.  In an odd way, this trip feels like both receiving and giving at the same time.  Allowing myself to be cared for by those who love me, and offering the same presence for someone walking a difficult road of their own. 

Maybe that’s what this trip is really about.  Not miles on a map or checking places off a list.  Maybe it’s learning how to let people I love show up for me in the same ways I have tried to show up for them over the years.  Sitting on Jennifer’s patio, laughing about stories that are forty years old, I’m beginning to realize that love does not always show with all the answers.  Sometimes it shows up as presence. I am still learning how to accept that.  And for the first time, I think that is perfectly ok.

Turns Out Writing Is How I Listen

I was texting with a friend recently about my recent blog on loneliness.  They said I was able to put words to a feeling they sit with often.  They went through a divorce a couple of years ago that included relocating quite some distance away.  They also mentioned that I was inspiring them to write.  I encouraged them to do exactly that, even if they didn’t publish anything like I have done mine.  The conversation got me thinking about something I already knew but didn’t have all the words for.  I was reminded that I didn’t start this blog because I thought I had any answers.  Most days I’m trying to figure things out pretty much in real time.  In fact, I’ve discovered that many of the things I write about aren’t things I already know.  They’re things I find out while I am pecking on the keyboard. 

Looking back, I figured that out decades ago.  For as long as I can remember, I’ve done a lot of wandering around inside my own head.  I can spend days overthinking things, turning it over and over again, running down rabbit holes and revisiting conversations that ended a long time ago.  As a buddy of mine would say, “I think we have kicked that particular horse to liquefaction.”  I used to think writing was what happened after all that processing was done.  Think about, figure it out, and then peck away on a keyboard. 

I have known for a while that typing it out helps me, and since Sandy died, it has become clear that the writing is where the real processing is happening.  Thoughts floating around in my head tend to stay half formed, kinda like puzzle pieces scattered on the table.  Once they hit the keyboard, they slow down long enough for me to look at them.  The connections start to appear, things I thought I had a good grip on take on a different meaning.  Things I didn’t realize were bugging me suddenly pop up.   Some of the biggest things I’ve learned about grief, loneliness, friendship, gratitude, marriage, and myself weren’t conclusions I sat down with.  They were discoveries that showed up somewhere around paragraph 3.

It might not be apparent to Y’all, but many times these posts start in one place and end up in an entirely different place.  What begins as a story about an old photograph, a song on the radio, an empty chair, or a cup sitting on the counter often becomes some new discovery about myself.  The story gets me started, the writing helps me figure out where I was actually headed.  I see this progressing in my posts, especially since April, which hardly makes sense to me, and here we are anyway.  The object or the story was almost never the point.  It was just the thread I started yanking on. 

I think that is why I keep writing.  Not because I have some great wisdom to share, and certainly not because I have life all figured out.  That is definitely not the case.  If anything, the older I get the more comfortable I become admitting that I don’t.   What writing gives me is a chance to slow down long enough to pay attention to what’s happening in my body and brain.  Life in general moves along at a blistering pace.  Thoughts come and go, feelings show up, make a mess of things and then run off and hide in the corner.  Writing forces me to wander my ass over to that dark corner and sit with those feelings for a while.  And that forces the questions I wasn’t planning on being asked, and that I have even less of an idea how to answer.

One of the surprising parts has been discovering that the things I am learning along the way aren’t always mine alone.  Time after time someone reaches out and says, “I thought I was the only one who felt that way” or “I didn’t know how to put that into words until I read what you wrote.”  Or just the many little notes of appreciation for writing these posts and  sharing them with the world on my little blog.  Most times I find it a bit odd because I am usually trying to make sense of my own thoughts when I start typing.   Somehow, in the process of listening to myself, other people hear parts of their own story too.

Maybe that’s because the things we carry around aren’t nearly as unique as we like to think they are.  The whole human condition thing and all.  The details may vary, the names change, and the stories are different.  One person may be grieving the loss of a spouse, another is grieving a marriage that ended and a life journey diverted.  Someone else might have lost a parent, or a close friend.  For others it could be a dream that didn’t work out the way they had hoped.  The circumstances are different, and the feelings underneath most of the time are not.  Whatever it was that I uncovered while pecking away on the keyboard is usually something they see in themselves.   

Maybe that’s what kept rattling around in my head after we finished texting.  Not because they complimented my writing.  What stuck with me was the realization that they had seen a piece of themselves in something I wrote while trying to understand myself.  That’s kind of amazing when ya stop and ponder on it for a moment. 

Two people living very different lives, carrying different stories and different scars, somehow finding common ground in places neither of us would have chosen to visit.  It felt like one of those rare moments when two people realize they’ve been carrying the same thing, even if they arrived there on different roads.  Maybe I wasn’t trying to understand myself after all.  Maybe the thing I keep finding in these stories isn’t answers.  It’s connection.  Because when somebody says, “Yeah, I know that feeling,” you realize that neither of us are quite as alone as we might have thought we were. 

Here is the Oratory that started it all. 

Loneliness Has a Hell of a Marketing Problem

I feel like I have written about loneliness a few times, but it was sort of tangentially.  Lately,  the loneliness has felt a lot more tangible.  When most folks think about loneliness, it is about just being physically alone.  I used to think that too.  Then life introduced me to a wide variety of loneliness, and it turns out that lonely is a lot more complicated than having an empty house.  Don’t get me wrong, it is that, and it is so much more.

Over the last several months I’ve met many versions of loneliness that I never knew existed.   There is the obvious loneliness, like her side of the bed being empty.   The passenger seat in the truck being empty.  All of the control chairs, empty.  The shower, where she kept an extraordinary amount of products is now down to my three lonely little items sitting in a space that belonged to both of us.  And the emptiness of no “Mornin Beautiful”.

Those are actually the easiest versions to identify.  They are visible.  You can see the empty chair.  You can see the empty side of the bed.  That next kind of loneliness is harder because no one sees it.  The loneliness of touch is one that I have been struggling with and have already written about.  An empty hand when I am walking around.  No long hugs.  No sitting with my head in her lap watching Star Trek.  All of the casual ways we touch our person over the course of a day, all empty, all quiet and all of it sucks.  There is no way to prepare yourself for just how loud this emptiness is.

And then, eventually, loneliness gets even sneakier.  The missing touch isn’t just about what you don’t feel anymore.  It’s about all the little moments throughout the day when your brain still reaches for your person before it remembers they’re not there.   This is the loneliness that nobody sees but holds equal measure.  I have no one to tell funny stories to, as I would have today listening to a first date conversation when I stopped at Firehouse subs for lunch.  I really wanted to show her my coffee cup I painted to match the Brakes on the Galaxie.  What gets me is that split second when I think I still can.  These realizations come dozens of times a day.  This loneliness isn’t like a giant wound, it is a thousand tiny ones, and that sucks too. 

And eventually I realized there was yet another version of loneliness hiding underneath all of those little moments.  Like when I hear a funny story at Firehouse subs, it isn’t just that I have nobody to tell.  It’s that nobody will laugh at the same parts that she would laugh about.  No one else would know all the characters from forty years of stories that we could compare that couple today on their first date to.  No one else has all the context. 

Bride and I spent decades building our own little world to play in.  It was filled with inside jokes, vacation disaster stories, and all the stories we shared on our adventures.  We could tell a whole story just with a look across the room.  Hahaha, I miss that.   Over the decades, we built a Large Language Library, kinda like AI does.  Day by day we added context and stories and shared experiences, and inside jokes.  And we used it in so many ways.  And then one day, I found myself holding all those books by myself.  That is a different kind of lonely. 

As lonely as that can feel, it would be unfair for me to pretend I am walking through this thing alone.  I have amazing family, chosen and real, coworkers who check in on me, and people who have shown up in ways I never expected.  And that is when I discovered yet another version of loneliness.  You can be deeply loved and still feel lonely.  That sounds contradictory, and I guess the only way to experience that is to live through it.  I am blessed with an army of people in my life who care about me.  They want to and have helped in ways I will never be able to repay.  They have shown up, literally in many cases, and been present for me and I am grateful for every bit of it.  I’ve sat in rooms surrounded by people I love, people who were showing up for me in every way possible, and still I found myself looking at an empty chair wishing her cute little ass was sitting in it.

There is a harsh reality though, no one else lived inside that little world Bride and built one brick at time together.  No one else carries the same memories, the same experiences or the same context.  They understand pieces of the story. They understand the hurt, and they understand I miss her, as do they.  They will never be able to fully understand what it was like to be us.  And that is another version of lonely.  Maybe that’s what makes loneliness so hard to explain to people who haven’t experienced it.  Both things can be true at the same time.  It’s all strange but a standout in this has been the loneliness and being loved can exist at the same time, back to the paradox.  The dialectic nature of loneliness is so fucking weird.  And somehow, loneliness still had one more surprise waiting on me. 

As strange as all those versions of loneliness are, I think the one that catches me off guard the most is the loneliness of a missing future together.  I have heard grief is more about missing the past, and it is.  I miss a thousand yesterdays, actually 12,995 yesterdays.  Twelve thousand nine hundred ninety five days, and I wanted more.  I miss old vacations, I miss old stories, I miss all the moments that are already written.  What I did not see coming was how much I would miss the things that never will get written at all. 

The trips we were still going to take.  The projects we had in planning stages, and the conversations we were yet to have.  The version of us that neither of us became yet.  Sometimes I realize I’m not lonely for who Bride was.  I’m lonely for who we were still supposed to become.  I am lonely for the future that will never be. 

Maybe that’s the biggest thing I’ve learned through all of this.  Every time I thought I understood loneliness, it showed up wearing a different costume.  It’s not just an empty chair sitting across from me.  It’s not just an empty hand.  It’s not just having no one to tell the story to.  It’s not just carrying a library of memories by myself.  It’s not just being loved and still feeling alone.  And it’s not just grieving the future that never got a chance to unfold. It’s all of those things, and probably more to come, all at the same time. 

Loneliness wears a lot of costumes.  Sometimes it can look like an empty house.   Sometimes it looks a crowded room.  Sometimes is looks like an empty passenger seat.  Sometimes it can look like me in the garage saying, hey Beautiful come look at this.  Sometimes it can look like 12,995 days of memories by myself.  And sometimes it can look like the realization that there are new memories of us that will never get written. 

Loneliness has a hell of a marketing problem because most people think they know what it looks like.  I know better now.  And if you happen to be carrying your own version of lonely, whatever costume it’s wearing today, just know you are not the only one meeting it.  I know I sure needed to hear that myself. 

Who Am I When Nobody Calls Me Husband?

I recently heard an old song by Clint Black called “Something That We Do” and before it ended I was bawling like a baby.   I remember distinctly when that song came out dancing with Bride to it.  It was one like Lacey J. Dalton’s Sixteenth Ave in that way.  We just danced every single time we heard either one.  We both thought something that we do perfectly described our relationship.  That remained true from that day through our last, we adopted it as our anthem.  Love’s not just something that we were in, it’s something that we did, he was singing about us in that song.  We did love, and we did the hell out of it.   

I listened to that song probably 100 times on repeat, in some ways torturing myself, in others letting my pain out through my eyeballs.  A number of lines kept popping for me, the first was, the way we work together is what sets our love apart, so closely that we can’t tell where I end and where you start.  That is as good a description of our marriage as I ever heard.  I think that’s why we both loved the song so much.

Looking back now, I realize how much started with what Clint Black called a simple vow.  It cracks me up, I mean it almost seems ridiculous, that a couple of kids could stand in front of chosen and actual family and promise forever.  We had absolutely no idea what forever might actually look like. We didn’t know anything about anything really.  Nothing about our careers, about cross country moves, financial struggles, health scares, celebrations, disappointments or all the ordinary Tuesdays watching Star Trek.  No idea that all of those woven together would eventually make up a life, and a hell a life at that.  We just both said yes, and then started putting one foot in front of the other.  All the while looking for what our next adventure would be.   Somewhere along the way, being her husband stopped being something that I did and became who I was.   

Not because either one of us lost ourselves in the other one.  With nearly 40 years, our lives became so intertwined.  Looking  back, separating them seems impossible.   Our stories, our memories, our traditions, our dreams for the future, all got knotted together into the tapestry that was our lives.  If someone asked either one of us where the other one’s story ends and theirs begins, I am not sure either of us could have answered that question.

I find myself still wondering where losing her has left me.  So much of who I was existed in relation to her, it made me wonder, who exactly am I now?   Husband wasn’t just a word on a tax return or relationship status.  It was a big part of how I understood myself and how I showed up in the world.  It shaped the way I made decisions, the way I looked at the future, even the way I told stories.  Nowadays I catch myself starting a sentence with “Bride and I…” and then realize there is no “and I” story without her somewhere in it.   

I’ll be standing around at work, telling a story about a road trip, a concert, a restaurant or some dumb thing that happened years ago, and before I know it, there she is in the middle of the story.  Not because I am trying to force her into the conversation, but because after nearly 40 years she was already there.  Maybe that’s what grief has been asking me all along.  Somewhere underneath husband, widower, and all the other labels, there is still just Smitty.  I just haven’t fully figured out who that dude is by himself yet.

When you’ve spend almost 40 years building a life with someone, nobody tells ya that when they die, you don’t just lose them.  You lose a big part of the dude the mirror reflects back at you every time you look in there.  No one asks how Bride is doing anymore.  No one addresses cards to both of us anymore.  No one introduces me as Sandy’s Husband.  Nobody calls me Gorgeous Groom anymore either.  That was a title that only my Beautiful Bride used, and she took it with her.  No one sees the version of me that existed alongside her anymore, because that version was only visible when she was standing there with me.   I guess that must be true for all of us.  People who love us don’t just share our lives, they help create versions of us that wouldn’t exist otherwise.   

Maybe that’s why this has been harder than I expected.  Not because I don’t know she was, I know exactly who she was.  Not because I don’t know what we were, we built a hell of life together and when ya do that, you know each other in ways that can only be felt, not described.  The question that now sneaks up on me from behind is simpler than that.  If no one calls me husband anymore, am I still one?  The paperwork says no, the world mostly says no, but my heart, it has refused to even accept that fucking memo, let alone open it.

Maybe the answer started showing up in another lyric I’d overlooked for years, we can find our strength and inspiration independently.  That’s one I never really paid much attention to back in the day.  Back then the focus was always on the together part.  Those words hit harder now, I hear something completely different than back then.  Sure, we built a hell of a life together.  That’s the funny thing.  We became inseparable without every becoming the same person.  We encouraged each other, we challenged each other, and we helped each other grow, but neither one of us took a back seat to the other.  Haha, like she would take a back seat to anyone.  As funny as that sounds, that’s actually an important distinction. Our time together shaped both of us, and at the same time did not erase either one of us.   And that was just fucking magic to me.  

Since Sandy died, I’ve learned that grief is a constant exercise in what the song calls holding tight, lettin’ go.  Every freaking step forward feels like both, damn it!  Taking off my wedding ring?  Both.  Wearing it on the chain?  Both.  Talking about her keeps me connected to the life we built, while learning to live without her asks me to loosen my grip on the future we were supposed to have together.  Grief does not seem interested in choosing one or the other.  Most days, it simply demands both at the same time, the duality in that just sucks

Maybe that’s why another lyric won’t leave me alone, each day we begin again.  That might be the truest thing I learned in the last few months.  There is no finish line waiting for me out there where grief suddenly makes sense.  There isn’t a morning when I wake up and have it all figured out.  There is just today.  Today I learn something new.  Today I miss her in a different way.  Today, I take another step forward.  And tomorrow, those same three things will be on my list of things to do today again. 

Maybe that’s why I talk about Bride all the time.  Maybe that’s why I feel married to a life we built together.  Not the house, the cars or any of the things.  The life.  The stories, the habits, the traditions.  The thousands of tiny pieces that became who we were.  Maybe that’s why I still catch myself looking for her opinion when something good happens, or when life throws me a curveball and I wish I could hug her tight, hear what she thinks, and know everything will be ok.  No one calls me husband anymore, and that fucking hurts.  But after nearly 40 years of doing love together, I don’t think that part of me simply disappears.  I think it is going to be a big part of the person I carry forward.  I think it just keeps traveling with me, on a road that has no end.

 

 

Tiny Islands of Certainty

So, an unexpected thing happened yesterday morning at 5am, I took off my wedding ring.  I wish I could tell ya there was some grand reason behind it.  That maybe I woke up with clarity, arrived at some profound realization, or finally crossed some invisible milestone in my grief journey.  The truth of it is much less dramatic.  When I got out of the shower, I looked at my ring, gave it a couple of spins, like I’ve done most every day for as long as I can remember. 

Then I slipped it off and rolled it around in my hand, something I have not really done before.  There wasn’t any intent behind it.  No deep meaning, just a mindless motion.  I wandered into the bedroom and grabbed the chain with Sandy’s rings out of the dish on my nightstand.  I slide her rings off and sat them back in the dish, and slipped my ring onto the chain.  

I stood there for a minute or two looking at it.  Not really thinking, just staring at it.  Just doing, not thinking.  Then I said out loud, fuck it and slipped the chain over my head and went about my day.  I caught myself several times that day playing with it without even realizing it.  Running my fingers over the ring while I worked, while I was in meetings, and while I drove home, all the while my mind wandered around between a forest of meaningless thoughts. 

That night I laid in bed staring at her rings sitting in the dish on my nightstand while I rolled mine around my neck.  All I could think was fuck, fuck, fuckity, fuck, fuck.  Not because her rings were in the dish.  Not because mine was hanging around my neck on a chain.  It was because for the first time since Sandy died, I wasn’t sure where either of them belonged.  And I can tell ya, that realization fucking sucked. 

To be clear, the rings weren’t really at the heart of it.  The issue was that they represented one of the few things in my life that still felt clear.  After she died, so much of my world became a gigantic question mark.  Who am I now?  What does the future look like?  Which  parts of my old life do I let go of, which parts do I hang on to, and which parts to I just learn to carry differently?  And somehow the rings remained simple.  

For months I knew exactly where they belonged, even when I had no idea where I belonged.  Her rings were on the chain, mine was on my finger. 

Tiny islands of certainty in an ocean of uncertainty.  Until they weren’t. 

And lying there in the dark, I realized I wasn't just asking where the rings belonged. I was questioning where I belonged on this leg of my journey.

As strange as it sounds, the next thing that popped into my head was the last cigarette I smoked, which was in 2004.  Most folks just assume when someone stops smoking there must have been some grand turning point or dramatic event.  But for me, there just wasn’t.  One day I was a smoker, the next day I wasn’t.  there was no ceremony, no strategy, no countdown.  Just a quiet decision that came out of nowhere one morning that I didn’t want to smoke anymore, so I didn’t.

The truth is, I don’t suspect it came out of nowhere at all.  I suspect that decision had been growing beneath the surface without me even realizing it.  And then one morning, I simply woke up and discovered what I used to feel was necessary, was not any more.  Laying there in bed staring at Sandy’s rings and absentmindedly rolling mine around the chain, I couldn’t help but wonder if grief works the same way. 

No because I am done grieving, I am not.  Not because I’m letting go of her, I never will.  Maybe I didn’t wake up yesterday and decide to take a step forward.  Maybe I simply discovered I already had.  Maybe sometimes all that works quietly in our subconscious, taking root while we are too busy surviving to notice. And then one day, we just find ourselves doing something unexpected and realize we’ve taken a step we never planned to take.  And If I am being honest, that realization is both comforting and terrifying at the same time. 

For months after Sandy died, the rings felt important because they were tangible.  Something I could touch.  Something I could hold onto when everything felt so damn intangible.  But lying there that night, I found myself wondering of the rings were ever really the evidence of our marriage in the first place.  Symbolic yes, evidence, maybe not.  After 38 years together, the evidence is everywhere, in stories, in memories, and in the habits we gave each other over the years.  It’s in the way I still talk to her sometimes.  It’s in the things that make me laugh.  Its in the way I still call her Bride without thinking about it. 

The truth is, I have no idea how long I’ll wear the chain with my ring.  Maybe this is where my ring belongs, and then again maybe it’s supposed to be just for right now.   What strikes me is that for the first time since Sandy died, I am willing to sit with the discomfort of not knowing.   Not knowing how long the ring will stay on the chain.  Not knowing if someday it ends up in the dish with Sandys rings, or maybe not.  Not knowing what any of it ultimately means.  And that is uncomfortable. 

If I am being completely honest with myself, I think what bothered me the most wasn’t the ring itself.  It was the realization that life keeps right on moving along, even when part of me wants to plant my feet, lean in and refuse to move along.  Every step forward in grief feels like a tiny betrayal, or a letting go of something ya don’t want to let go of.  Intellectually I know that is not true.  Loving Sandy and continuing to live are not mutually exclusive.  But as I have said before, my emotional self does not much care about my intellectual side, especially when it comes to the grieving process. The same damn dichotomy that still fucking sucks.   

For today, the ring hangs on a chain around my neck and that is enough.  I have no idea what the chain means yet, maybe that’s why I am writing this.  And maybe, maybe it means nothing.  Grief is a lot like life in that regard, you get the test before you get the lesson.  Things are revealed to us long before we can understand them.  My journey has been full of moments that I did not recognize were important until I was standing on the other side of it. 

Grief has a way of working behind the scenes.  It quietly rearranges things while were busy trying to survive another day.  Then without warning, it reveals results.  Maybe that is what happened here.  Maybe the ring was never the story.  Maybe the story is realizing that grief keeps changing us long after we think it has done its worst to us.  Maybe the story is discovering that some part of me has already begun adapting to this reality before the rest of me is ready to admit it. 

So here I am, not really moving on, not really letting go.  Just learning.  Taking one uncomfortable step at a time, trying to figure out how to carry 38 years of love into a future I never planned on living.