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. 

The Loss of Intimacy Has Sucked

I don’t know if can finish writing this one, I’ve started it three times already and then deleted it.  Part of me isn’t sure I want to admit any of this out loud.  The other part is exhausted from just carrying it around.  Over the last few days, I have listened to a song more times than I can count, and one line keeps settling in my chest, they say real healing starts when the truth gets told.  So, this is me trying to tell my truth.  I hope I make it to the end.  I hope I have the courage to post it if I do.

One of the strange things about grief is that folks tend to assume they know what hurts.  They know I miss her.  They know I miss the conversations, and they know I miss the future I thought we would have together.  And they’re right, I miss all of those things. What folks don’t always see are the things that quietly disappear underneath all of that.  The things that are harder to talk about.  The things that are even harder to admit.  The things we carry in silence because once they are spoken out loud, they are impossible to ignore.   The hell of it is silence has a hunger.  It feeds on what we hide, and somehow the things we refuse to talk about just seem to get bigger and heavier.   

One of the truths I’ve been avoiding, the loss of intimacy has fucking sucked.  Even typing that sentence makes me very uncomfortable.  Not because it isn’t true, but because it is.  Over the 115 days since I lost her, I have built a rehearsed reply for whenever someone asks how I’m doing.  Most of the time it isn’t even dishonest.  I’m working, I’m writing, I’m rebuilding the Galaxie, and I’m moving forward.  If I am being honest with myself, some days I do those things in an attempt to outrun my thoughts.  But there are still parts of this loss that have settled in my chest and are slowly weighing me down.  This is one of them.

Intimacy for me was never just one thing.  It was closeness, familiarity, trust, vulnerability, and being known.  I mean truly known by another person.  In many ways, I think she knew me better than I knew myself.  It was shared thoughts, shared history, shared understanding.  It was emotional, physical, and woven into the fabric of our daily lives.  I rarely stopped to think about it because it felt so natural.  It was the most stabilizing part of our relationship for me.  And when Sandy died, I lost every version of it all at once.

When most folks hear the word intimacy, they immediately think about sex.  That’s a part of it but it is not really what I have been struggling with.  What I miss are the things that happened a hundred times a week and never seemed important because they were just part of who we were.  Holding hands when we walked, a good hug when one of us had a shitty day.  A kiss every time one of us left the house, and another when we got home.  Sitting together, sometimes talking, sometimes reading, and sometimes just dicking around on the interwebs. 

Then reaching over, touching her hand without even really thinking about it. The casual physical connection that said, I’m here and you’re not alone.  She did that for me as much as I did for her.  Just a gentle reminder that I was not alone.  Those moments were so normal, so automatic that I never once stopped to appreciate how much they grounded me in love.  Those little moments were never the headline, but they were masterfully woven into the fabric of our lives.  Looking back, all those little touches were a constant reminder we belonged to each other.  And there were two people in the world who kept choosing each other.   I didn’t realize how much security, comfort and connection were hidden inside of something as simple as holding her hand or hugging each other.

We were deliberate about holding at least one hug every day for at least 30 seconds.  It was so long ago, I don’t remember which one of us read an article about the health and relationship benefit of doing that.  It is enough time for your breathing to align.  I used to believe our heartbeats did too.  Those hugs were moments when everything in the world faded and we both felt safe, secure and loved in ways that are hard to describe.  If you have never done that, do it today, and again tomorrow and the day after that, it is the most amazing feeling.      

And that daily dose of love is no more.   I think what surprised me the most is how lonely the loss of physical connection can feel.  I wasn’t prepared for just how lonely that would be.  The loneliness created by that loss is unlike anything I have ever experienced.  I mean, I have family, chosen and real, coworkers, and people who love me.  But there is a difference between being surrounded by those who love me and having my person.  There is a difference between being cared about and having someone reach over and reflexively squeeze my hand as a silent reminder that I am not carrying the weight of the world alone.  That kind of loneliness is really hard to describe and even harder to live with in the day to day of things. 

Maybe that is why this post has been so hard to write.  For 115 days I’ve carried this heavy ass thing by myself.  The truth is, some of the words I never say have started to feel like a prison wall of my own making.  It is easier to tell folks I miss Sandy than it is to admit how much I miss the intimacy of our life together.  It’s easier to talk about grief in general terms than it is to talk about specific things that sometimes leave me feeling completely lost.  Maybe that’s why I have those rehearsed answers at the ready.  Maybe that’s why I started this post three times already and deleted it each time.  Because saying this out loud makes it real, really real, and that really hurts.  And maybe admitting how much I miss all of it feels like admitting that part of me is still carrying a shattered heart, and there is a finality that I am not sure I am ready for.

Ya know, as I type this I am realizing maybe what I’ve been avoiding isn’t talking about intimacy at all.  Maybe what I’ve been avoiding is admitting what it means.  Maybe I’ve been avoiding admitting that in some ways I am still a little lost.  Because once I say these things out loud, I have to acknowledge something I have been trying very hard not to face.   Those hugs aren’t coming back.  That hand will never reach for mine again.  There won’t be another kiss when I leave the house, or when I get home.  The finality of that just fucking sucks.  It aches all the way down to my soul.  I guess that is probably why I deleted this post three times already.  Because some truths hurt more when they are spoken.  I have learned though, that they hurt just as much when carried in silence.  The only difference is one moves me forward and one keeps me stuck.  I have carried this heavy fucker long enough and I’m putting it down.

Truth be told, I don’t know if writing this helps.  I don’t know if posting it helps.  I don’t know if tomorrow will feel any different than today.  What I do know is that after 115 days, this truth is finally out in the open.  Maybe that is all this post was supposed to do, not solve anything, not heal anything, just telling the truth about where I am.

And today, that feels like enough.

The Day I Took Off the Necklace

For those who don’t know, two days after Bride passed, I went to a pawn shop and bought a necklace.  For those who know me, you know I am not a jewelry type dude, I don’t even wear a watch.  The only thing I have worn, every day, was my wedding ring.  It might seem weird, like it did for me, to buy one.  I needed a place to keep her rings, somewhere close.  I have not taken those rings off, not for sleeping, not for working on the Galaxie, or showering, not once.

We always started at pawn shops when looking for jewelry, one of her sets was from a pawn shop.  She wore only that for a very long time.  When we were in Oregon, I had another one made for her.  She wanted a wide band with a square diamond.  I found the ring, a wider man’s gold band, and I liked the look of it.  Then I found a pair of solitaire earrings that looked perfect, setting and all.  The jeweler made them for a customer who never came back.  I convinced him to break up the pair, snip off the post, and solder one directly on the band, and voila, a ring for Bride.  

It helped me a lot in the days since then.  Without really thinking about it, touching those rings became part of how I moved through my grief.  First thing I touched when I woke up.  The last thing I touched before going to sleep.  And a hundred times in between.  In meetings, driving down the road, sitting alone in the house when it was quiet.  When my fingers found those rings, somehow everything felt a bit steadier.

After a while I stopped paying attention to how often I touched them.  Reaching for them had become automatic.  For 87 days my hand found them without thinking about it.  First thing in the morning, last thing at night and a hundred times between.  If you had asked me when I bought that necklace if there would ever be a day when I didn’t need to reach for those rings, I’d have said there wasn’t a snowballs chance in hell. 

Sometime this afternoon it occurred to me that I hadn’t touched the rings all day.  It felt a little strange.   For the last 87 days my hand found them without even thinking.  My first reaction was something was wrong.  Not with the necklace.  With me.  Had I just been too busy to notice?  Too distracted?  Was I getting used to grief the same way you stop noticing  a wedding ring after wearing it for years?   I wasn’t sure I liked any of those answers.  I reached up and touched them, and they were exactly where they’ve been.  Same necklace, same rings, same bit of comfort that carried me through some very hard days.

But something was different.  I shifted over to one of my ponder chairs and spent some ponder time on that thought.  The longer I sat with it, the harder it was to believe something was wrong.  Then it occurred to me that maybe I had been looking at this backwards.  The necklace was never carrying Bride.  It was carrying her rings.  Bride was in a thousand other places.  She was in the stories I tell.  The habits we built together over nearly 40 years.  The little phrases I still catch myself saying because she used them so often.  The way I see the world.  The way I show love.  And the way I go through my days, trying to spool more good into the universe than I do negative.  Those things defined who we were.

She is in every room of this house, not because her things are here, but because our life was happening here.  She is in the Galaxie because every decision I make on that car was shaped by something we dreamed about or planned together.  She is baked into my routines.  Hell, she is in some of the sentences I write without even realizing it.

The necklace has done exactly what I needed it to do.

In those first days, when the loss felt so overwhelming that I needed something tangible to hold on to, something to anchor me, and it gave me that.  Every time my fingers found those rings, it reminded me that what we had was real.  That she was real.  That nearly four decades together actually happened.  Today I realized that I didn’t need a tangible thing to remind me of her.  Not because I miss her less.  Not because I loved her less.  And certainly not because I had forgotten her.    

The truth was exactly the opposite.  Somewhere between day one and day 87 since she passed, I think I finally understood something I probably should have known all along.  Bride was never hanging around my neck.  She had already worked her way into every part of who I am. 

The necklace was carrying her rings.  I will be carrying her for the rest of my days.  So, this evening, I took it off.  It now sits in a small dish, made by a friend after she passed, on my nightstand. 

Somehow, Bride doesn’t feel any farther away.

Smitty’s Technology Free Zone

You probably would not expect the average Chief Technology Officer to have a place called the Technology Free Zone.  Truth be told, I have always had a complicated relationship with average and normal.  If you have known me for more than 10 minutes, you already know that I have never really done normal in any aspect of my life. 

The Technology Free Zone isn’t complicated.  It’s just my garage.  It is a place where the only thing asking for my attention is whatever old assed thing I happen to be tinkering with.     There are no software compatibility questions, no firmware updates, and no Docker servers.  Just an old tube radio providing the soundtrack while I work. 

In a world that seems determined to demand my attention every few seconds, the garage asks only one thing of me.  When I walk out there, it asks me to be absolutely present.  It does not matter if I am building a table, restoring an old drill press, or wrenching on a car.  It is one of my Zen spots for sure.

These days, the thing dominating the garage is a 1963 Galaxie Convertible.  Bride and I had agreed to do a bunch of work to improve reliability, even setting aside the funds to do it.  I’ve gotten the rear suspension and drive train removed.  I have most of the new parts and most of the ones staying are cleaned up.  That comes with a tediousness that I find relaxing.  Scraping off decades of mung, and I am not talking about the small green legume.  This work takes zero brain power, it just takes doing the dang thing. 

This work is quite the opposite of my job.  That revolves around solving problems with knowledge.  My Galaxie cares little about how smart I am.  And as a certain small green Jedi once taught an entire generation, there are moments in life when less thinking and more doing is exactly what is required.  That is the way of things in my garage.

Bride’s opinion of this kind of work was pretty straightforward.  “Why do you even like doing this?” she’d ask.  “It looks like a giant pain in the ass.” And if I were only looking at a pile of greasy road caked suspension parts on the bench, it was hard to argue with her assessment.  The best answer I ever came up with was that this kind of work doesn’t ask me anything other than being present. 

The Jalopy parts don’t care about my title.  They don’t care about strategy documents, budgets, or technology roadmaps.  The only thing the parts care about is whether I am willing to spend the time to clean them up and put them back together correctly.  If I am being honest, I don’t really enjoy the cleaning parts, nobody does.  What I do enjoy is the space just doing the dang thing creates.  It gives my brain a place to land.  Mindlessness.  There isn’t much room for worrying about tomorrow when you’re focused on a wire brush defunkifying a part that has been collecting crud since John F. Kennedy was in office.

I have done this kind of work on cars for a long time and have come to love it in an odd Smitty kinda way.  But this time feels different.  Somewhere in the methodicalness, between the scraping, cleaning and painting of all the bits, it occurred to me that the Galaxie wasn’t the only thing being repaired and restored. 

I don’t mean restored in any sort of Hollywood ending kinda way, we all know real life doesn’t work like that.  And there is no replacement part for losing someone you love.  What I mean is simpler.  Somewhere along the way I had lost track of how much I enjoy the process of making something better with my own two hands.  The Galaxie wasn’t fixing my grief, it wasn’t fixing my loneliness, and it wasn’t going to bring Bride back.  Maybe that’s why I keep showing up.  I believe both of us still have a few miles left in us.

The other night I was sitting in the garage ponder chair waiting on paint to dry on a couple of parts.  Just me, sitting and staring.  Not because they were particularly impressive, they weren’t.  I was staring and pondering on their transformation.  From a grungy old funkified part a week ago to now a shiny freshly painted part, actually it was matte paint but you get the idea.  No one but me will probably ever see them once I reinstalled them under the car, but I know what they look like.  Nobody restores a car for what it is today.  We do it because we know it can become tomorrow.  Every part cleaned, every bushing replaced, every hour spent in the garage is a small vote for a future that does not yet exist.  Maybe that’s what the Technology Free Zone has really been giving me all along.  Not an escape from technology, but a place quite enough to notice I was changing too.  

I can almost hear Bride asking the question again.  “You spent how many hours cleaning that up?”  She never understood the appeal.  Then again, I guess she didn’t have to.  She understood me, and that was enough.  Well, that and she loved riding around in this convertible. 

There is still a long way to go on the old Girl.  There are boxes of parts yet to be opened, even more yet to be ordered.  I am sure there will be a few surprises around the corner, that is just how it works with old cars.  So, it is with life as well, more boxes, more surprises.  For now, I am content to spend a few hours in the garage, listening to an oldies station on my old tube radio and working on whatever bit is next in line to be worked on.

The goal started as improving the reliability of a 1963 Galaxie 500 convertible.  These days, I am not entirely sure that is the only thing being restored.  I just know that every part cleaned, every bolt turned, and every evening spent in my Technology Free Zone leaves something a little better tomorrow than it was today. 

The Galaxie isn’t finished.  Neither am I.

Knowing Everything I Knew, I Would Still Choose Bride

Even now, knowing how the story ends, it would still be her that I chose, EVERY SINGLE TIME!  The older we got, the more we knew life wasn’t about choosing someone once.  Love for us was about choosing each other again, and again and again.  Anyone can choose someone when they’re dating.  The real choosing starts after the puppy love, when we have seen each other tired, stubborn, scared shitless, imperfect, hurt, frustrated, grieving, aging, and just the unvarnished humans we were.  The funny thing is that the more I learned about Bride, the easier the choosing got. 

I got to thinking about this after listening to a song sung by Chris Stapleton and P!nk called “I will choose you a thousand times”.   I felt like during Bride and my time together this song could have been one of our anthems.   When we started seeing each other we were convinced this was nothing more than a fling.  We agreed that we would just be fuck buddies, her term, until we stopped having fun, and we never did.  When she got out of the Navy, she was going back to Texas, and that was that.  I learned much later that in the beginning she was afraid of us.  She had had her heart broken and she was afraid I would end up with the power to do that to her, and she did not want anyone to have that again, ever again.

We had our share of pain over the years.  We buried parents, and friends.  We worried about money at times.  We bickered about things that felt important in the moment but turned out to be ridiculously stupid minutes later.  We celebrated victories, banged through the potholes of life as we watched each other become more fully ourselves than the ones who started that “fling” all those years ago.  Through all of that journey, neither of us woke up one day and decided to stop choosing.   We used to joke that no one else would have either one of us, so it had to be us.    

The longer we were together, the less effort either of us spent putting up the façade we thought the other one wanted, or needed.  The filters went away.  The rough edges were exposed, like the opposite of how sanding a big ass chunk of walnut works.  The habits became the rhythm of our lives, and that included all the quirky, idiosyncratic nonsense we both carried.  Along the way, I stopped falling in love with the version of Bride I met, and simply fell in love with her, all of her. 

One of the things I learned was that Bride didn’t need saving from any of it.  She was more than capable of taking care of herself, and usually that is how that worked.  She was strong, courageous, independent, and stubborn as hell when she needed to be, and absolutely certain when she thought she was right, even if she wasn’t.  The funny thing was that the longer I knew her, the more those things became the very reason I chose her instead of reasons not to.

That stubborn bit, I bumped into that just a bit before she passed.  It had been a while, so it surprised me.  We had talked about putting a pool in our back yard, to the point of setting aside some cash to do it.  When the quotes came in and plans were sketched out, I started getting cold feet.  She wanted a pool back there.  I talked about the investment never being recouped, as is the way with pools, I talked about the economy, the length of time we might live here and how long we would use it.  All the logical things to think about, she didn’t care.

At the end of our last discussion, we were both exasperated and were probably talking past each other.  I went downstairs for a bit and when I came up, she was nowhere to be found.  We have an app on our iPad that tracks the locations of our phones.  I had never used it before and just tried calling her, but there was no answer each time.  I texted her and finally she texted back, she had gotten a hotel room and was going to stay there that night. I called until she answered, and she had the Terri Clark song, “I just wanna be mad” song playing in the background.  She was mad for a while, then I went up and we talked and then laughed and then came home.  We paid for a hotel room she was in for less than an hour. 

Looking back on that night now, it makes me smile.  Today what I remember most about that night, that right thar was Bride being Bride.  Determined, stubborn, certain and unwilling to back down when she believed in something.  It is silly little things like that that made choosing her so freaking easy.    

We always remembered that in situations like that, it was not me against her, or her against me.  It was us against the problem.  Some days we were better at remembering that than others.  But each and every time, one of us would play the “I just wanna be mad” card for the other one.  The goal was never to win an argument.  The goal, above all else, was preserving our relationship, making it easy to keep on choosing the other one.

Looking back now, I think one of the things I loved the most about Bride was that she never really became someone different.  She simply became more authentically herself over the years.  The directness that felt abrupt at the beginning became one of the things I admired most about her, the zero bullshit game was strong with this one.  The funny thing is that the things that surprised me about Bride in the beginning eventually became the things I treasured most.  Her stubborn streak, her orneriness, and her zero bullshit approach to life, that is what made the choosing easy.

Even now, knowing everything I know, the joy, the pain, the victories, the losses and yes even knowing how the story ends. 

It would still be her.

EVERY SINGLE TIME.

Wearing My Years Like an Old Carhartt Jacket

For quite some time I have framed getting older through the deterioration of my body.  The stiffness, the soreness, the slower recovery, and lack of stamina.  I realized on my recent beach time something else about growing older.  Not everyone gets the opportunity to do so,  and bitching about this malady or that one is probably focusing on the wrong bits.  The world spins fast, faster than we want it to most days.  But we keep chasing the things we think are important.  Y’all, not everything needs chasing, there is meaning in the mundane parts of the day to day of our lives.

I am starting to see part of me more clearly than I used to, and I thought I saw it all.  Some of it stuck, some of it didn’t, and some was just noise I carried around longer than I needed to.  I feel like I need to start wearing my years a little more these days.  Not like a weight or burden, but like something that finally fits.  Kinda like that old Carhartt jacket Bride bought for me a hundred years ago.

We often played the game of talking about what we’d be doing had we never met.  Kinda like making up stories about other people when we were people watching, only with our own lives.  That game always made me realize the beauty in the things I missed.  The roads I did not take, the decisions I did not make, they all led to a life that never happened, and I was glad they didn’t.  Playing that game cemented for both of us that a completely random set of lived experiences led us to each other, and we would not trade any of the pain of the journey, because the journey led us to us.

Key bits of our lives, especially the mundane, drive our journey, and so do the big things.  Sometimes it’s the smallest, dumbest moments that end up mattering the most.  For example, had either one of us not ended up in the Navy, our paths would have never crossed.  For me, I skipped school that day in 1982 when I was a junior in high school.  Me and a couple of my buddies were sitting in the front yard smoking pot and drinking Old English 800 through a straw.  Up pulled a little K-car with “US Government” stenciled on the side.  Turns out he was lost and asked how to get to Springfield from here.  My drunk and stoned dumbass said “ya can’t get there from here”.  He jumped out, I thought I was about to get my ass kicked but instead I got talked into joining up.  How fucking random is that?

For Bride, the most courageous woman I have ever met, at the age of 28 she decided the best way to detox from cocaine was to join up and detox in boot camp.  First of all, going to boot camp is hard at any age, but doing it at 28 is really hard.  Layer on detoxing at the same time, holy shitballs Batman, that is courage and perseverance in action.  That is how she lived her whole life though, so looking at it now all I can say is “of course that’s how she detoxed”, there could be no other way for her.  And sometimes I have to stop right there and think about what kind of courage looks like over a lifetime, it was quintessentially her.  And somehow those two random things, 4 years apart, are what allowed us to meet.  That is just nuts.  

That younger version of me still shows up sometimes, cocky and filled with false confidence.  Maybe it was reckless hope, cocksure when I had no cred to back it up.  It’s funny to think back on that kid, and later the man I became.  He still shows up sometimes with his bullshit.  I still listen to him, but I don’t let him drive anymore, mostly cause he was a dumbass.  Don’t get me wrong, I am forever grateful he was the dumbass he was, it led to a life well lived with the most amazing woman ever.  

Time hasn’t taken anything from me, not really.  Not in the ways that matter most.  Time, it’s been refining me.  Softening the edges, slowing me down just enough to finally see clearly.  Finding peace in those places I never stopped in, or simply walked on by on my way to somewhere else.  There was a time when I didn’t know myself nearly as well as I thought I did, I guess that is probably still true now.

My Beautiful Bride saw the loud parts, and the quiet ones.  She said to me on more than one occasion she wished she could know that younger and wilder version of me.  She also appreciated the man I was, the confident version of me and the one still trying to figure my shit out and she was always there to help.  She knew me better than I knew myself, and rest assured better than anyone else knew me, and somehow that never felt like a bad thing.

Ya start to realize something after living a bit of life.  Looking back, it lines up in ways I didn’t see while I was in it. The mess, the dumb decisions, the wrong turns, they all ended up pointing me to here and I would not trade a moment of it.

And yeah, there’s a price that comes with understanding all that.  When you’ve been known the way I was known, when someone really saw you, all of you, and stayed anyway… that does not just disappear, it sticks around.  It shows up at the oddest times, middle of the day, nothing special happening, and it just hits.  Not as loud, not quite as overwhelming, just this quiet steady knowing that we had something real.  

It’s different now, but not gone.  Not really. 

And here is what took me a bit to understand in the fog of grief, our love story doesn’t empty me out.  It fills my heart with love and warmth, even with her absence and I like that. 

New rule, Smitty is going to be wasting a lot less time on things that don’t matter.  Just don’t have the energy or desire to do it anymore.

She was a hottie in white polyester.  She was receiving her Navy Achievement Medal here. 

Turned Up Too Loud

So, I flew back home to Lincoln Friday, and I have been struggling with a lot of different feels.  Some tied to that, others just showing up like they got something to say.   That’s probably not random at all.  Just part of the process.  Either way, they are here and they are loud.  This is by far the most intense the feels have felt since my Beautiful Bride passed.  Today, everything got cranked up to 11, I’m old and don’t like music that loud anymore.

I want to say this first, I felt incredibly supported and loved over those two weeks.  The kind of love and support that only old friends can give.  Some of these folks go back to the early 90’s, Navy days.  I remember their kids being born, and now those kids are grown ass adults.  One day we were smoking ribs, hanging out and I had to go sit on another room.  Just overwhelmed from sharing space with so many folks I love. 

Sharing space like that, chosen family all in one place, is something I haven’t found yet in Lincoln.  And this time it hit different, because it was just me.  No Beautiful Bride.  She was always the life of the party at those sorts of events and that showed up hard.  She loved a great party.  Always quick with a story, or even quicker with the most amazing laugh when other stories were told.  It just felt weird and I feel lonely in a way I hadn’t felt before.   

That led something I wasn’t expecting, guilt.  Which is weird because I don’t really feel guilt, never have, and she figured that out early.  Guilt is an emotion I don’t have much experience with, so it is hitting harder and sticking around longer than other ones I have been cycling through since her death.  I caught myself feeling weird about how long it took for it to show up this strong.

I know grief is a fickle bitch, but I was not expecting it to show up and punch as hard as it has.  It is almost like it picked the one emotion I have the least experience with and decided that was my weak point.  This isn’t to say this hasn’t been hard.  I am only saying I have more experience processing almost every other emotion or feeling.  So maybe it is just an opportunity to practice, which pissed me off because I don’t want to practice on that one, I have lived the better part of my life not feeling guilt and I am not sure I want to start now. 

I also started feeling some guilt about these blog posts.  So much about me and not about her.  Seems silly to think about but that is what is going on in my head.  And one thing I have learned through my time on the journey, we cannot control how we feel.  Best we can do is control our reaction to those feelings.  I also felt a bit of guilt about writing so much about how I am feeling, it sorta feels like I am wallowing around in it.  Intellectual Smitty knows that is not the case, but emotional Smitty ain’t so sure right now.  I know this is part of the process but damn it Jim, I am not a guilt dude!

It’s a funny thing, our feelings and the emotions that are connected to them.  In my brain, the intellectual part, I know this is part of this journey.  The emotional side of my brain cares little, that dichotomy is a cruel joke the universe plays.  It isn’t just grief either, it has been around for a long time, at least with me.  Like guilt I guess, it is the universe saying here is something to test you, to test your mettle.  Like all things in life, we get the test first and the lesson later.  Seems backwards to what it oughta be but that’s what it is, at least for me.

Aside from the guilt bit, I also came away with an awful lot of uncertainty about what the next chapter is.  I am super fortunate to be in a position that I can really do anything I want to, well within reason.  I just don’t know what it wants to be yet and if I follow the lessons from the rest of my life, the universe will put something in front of me when its time.  In some ways I just wanna get on with it, and in others I know forcing things never produces good outcomes, at least in my lived experiences.  So, in addition to everything else that seems to be swirling around me, there is that quandary too.

Whether I like it or not, this thing does not come in a straight line.  That whole turned it up to 11 feeling, as much as I hate it, it doesn’t feel like going backwards as much as it does something new showing up.  It might just be the next layer deciding it’s time for you to deal with me now.  This seems to be the part where it stops being something I understand in my head and turns into something I must feel and experience.

Being around folks, folks who knew us when we were all still trying to figure life out, that was different.  It wasn’t just missing her, it was missing us.  Who we were together in those spaces.  That version of me is still in there somewhere, but it is just off balance and unable to get firm footing.  It’s kinda feels like I’m carrying half of something that used to be whole, and I just don’t know what to do with that.  And that uncertainty sits heavy on me.  I know this next chapter, whenever it arrives, will probably have something to do with figuring out how to hold onto that part of us without getting stuck in it.  All that while I am also learning how to be half of what I once was.

And maybe, even the parts I don’t like, especially the guilt, aren’t wrong.  I don’t have to like all the parts, but I also don’t think any of them are mistakes.  They are just part of the system that is Smitty trying to reset after the most massive overhaul to date.  I damn sure don’t feel ready for any of it, I don’t even like the test first, lesson later arrangement, never have.  But most likely this isn’t about doing it right or even doing it fast.  Maybe just doing the dang thing is the thing to do, whatever the hell the dang thing is.  That intellectual side of my brain knows this, the emotion side… yeah, that bastard is still telling me something very different.  Damn it.

And I keep coming back to the same thought.  It’s not just that she is gone.  It’s that the version of me that existed with her does not have a place to stand anymore.  And I don’t think I know how to build that footing back yet.  At some point I am guessing this settles down a bit.  Or maybe I just get a little better at carrying it.  Either way, today wore me slap out.  So yeah, everything still feels turned up too loud.  And the knob just spins when I try to turn it down. 

Two Pretty Damn Amazing Weeks

Well I just got a text letting me know my departure from Jacksonville to Chicago has been delayed.  It appears I still have an hour and 21 minutes  between gates in Chicago for my Lincoln flight.  So I decided I might try to type out a quick Oratory.  I am now at JAX waiting departure so I thought I would finish this one. 

So today I head back home from spending 2 weeks in Jacksonville Florida.  I was completely unplugged from everything, work, house, bills, and most of all my puppy, Handsome Petey Kabuki McPants McGillicuddy, more commonly referred to as Larry O.  From all appearances, he has enjoyed himself.  His tail was pointing up every time I watched, and that I know means he is happy.  Plus, he had extra cuddle time, that was a great upsell at drop off.  I am looking forward to scooping up the butt dart from the border and loving on him.  I have watched him playing every day, their camera system could you some work, I think I will suggest a trade of my expertise for boarding days. 

I shared space and a lot of meals with a lot of chosen families on my trip.  I went to have a meal with folks at places we always went to when we lived here.  Well, except Lubi’s, Bride could not stand a loose meat sandwich.  They were probably heart attacks on bun but damnnnnnn, they are good.  I shared three home cooked meals as well, and they were equally yummy. 

I watched the sunrise every morning, one of them was in Ocala and the rest were at the beach.  I love sunrise, but boy watching in a chair in the surf at the ocean is something everyone should do at least once in their lives.  I just wish I wasn’t learning how to love it again without her.  I remember back in the day a great friend of mine came down here to Florida from Ohio and we went to sunrise as his first time seeing the ocean – it was magnificent and a gift to me to watch someone see that for the first time.  Coincidently, my Niece and her family were also vacationing here so I got a sunrise with her and got to spend some time with her family.

Jacksonville is very much different and very much the same, it just does not feel like home anymore.  I’ve  always said home is where I hand my hat, but it turns out that wasn’t quite right.  Home was wherever she was.  That is what Smithlandia really meant.  All but the three hats I brought with me are still in Lincoln, and I have hundreds and that collection started all the way back to high school.  And yes, since the Beach Diner is closing, I bought one of their hats.

I got to hug a lot of necks, and that was very much needed.  There is something special about that kinda hug, the kind where nobody is really saying anything, and yet everything is being said.  Some of them held on a little longer than normal, and we both knew why.  Because for a few seconds, it filled a space that has been too damn quiet, for both of the of us. 

While I saw a lot of people, I also had a lot of alone time, that was good and bad.  Still writing down three things every morning looking for forward momentum.   Some days its three steps forward, and then, in the same day, its two more backwards.  And every morning I’m still waking up to world she is not in anymore, left wondering how that’s even real.

Overall I have moved forward but the pace is spotty.  And that is the new norm so that is just OK.  I am glad I sprinkled a few ashes as well, while not closure it did feel a bit like adding a period at the end of a sentence.  Problem was, I was not ready for the sentence to end.  I just sat there for a bit after.  It was nice to have that time when I was out of my element.  No constant reminders, no work things, no house things, no dog things, just me, myself and I.

And now for an abrupt topic change, I rented a Hyundai Sonata, it was a hybrid and I kinda liked it.  Well, I liked the efficiency and tech.  Over the two week period I put gas in it twice, and the overall average for my two weeks was 44.7 MPG, which is a hell of lot better than my truck.  Not enough to make me switch yet, but it got my attention.  The tech package was pretty impressive as well, lane drift protection, adaptive cruise, and self steering, although I turned that off after just a minute or two.  The only thing I did not like about it was it was low to ground, I’m old and fat so…  and the drivers compartment was crowded, see aforementioned note on being fat and old.

So I will be back in Lincoln tonight, and will pick up Larry in the morning, after his bath and nail trim and other pampering.  Fingers crossed the two flights are uneventful.

So I Stay, and I Keep Reading

I keep reminding myself that this is going to work out, that Smitty is going to be OK.  Even though there are days when it just doesn’t feel like it.  Maybe days is stretching it at this point.  Maybe it’s hours, or minutes or moments where it just seems overwhelming to me.  I also remind myself that I will not have the dynamic duo I had for so long.  The we, the us, and the they are gone.  I  am now just the me, the he, and the I.  It still feels weird to be using those tenses, and I stumble over them all the time.  I guess that will be the norm for a while, maybe forever and I don’t even mind anymore, small reminders of who we were together.

I know this is not my forever, this is a chapter and thank goodness chapters come to an end and a new one begins, that is the way of things in the world.  If I span across the whole journey, this chapter is the one I like the least.  It has been the most difficult, I think because I was so used to having a partner in the game.  Someone who would listen, encourage, support and love me, just like I did for her.  It feels a little isolating to be thinking about this and working my way through it without her, I miss her wisdom in moments like these.

I still have to fight the urge to treat this moment like the whole story.  It feels so large and heavy that it is sometimes hard to see over or around it and recognize that this is just a chapter in a much larger story.  The story we created was simply amazing by any standard.  I knew that and so did she, but I don’t think I understood the magnitude of how amazing we were together.  Spending a couple of weeks here in Florida, surrounded by chosen family, has been a great reminder of that, and I am grateful for each of those reminders, spoken and implied.

Somewhere out there, there is a version of me who made it through all of this.  In some ways I wish I could time travel forward to that dude.  Other times that feels like cheating.  I don’t really know how to explain that part.  I just know it hits wrong.  I just know there is something about skipping ahead that feels wrong, like I’d be missing some ugly part that was necessary to help me become whoever I am supposed to be after this chapter.  I don’t like that, not even a little.  But I also know I don’t get to only read the good parts the story.  So, I will keep moving through the pages, wherever the story goes and however difficult to read, until I get to that future me, who will have been forged into that future me by the journey itself. 

Realizing I’m no longer the one writing this story is really messing with my head.  It is disorienting in a way that does not make sense to me, her absence just turns up the volume on all of it.  It’s like the whole thing gets louder when I try to make sense of it.  I feel like most of that comes down to how badly we want to believe we are in control, like if we just try hard enough or think clearly enough, we can simply negotiate with the page to say something different.  But that ain’t how this works, not really.  Letting go and just being feels wrong, almost like I am violating some of the base code I am programmed with.  Every thing in me wants to push back, rewrite a few lines of code, to do something other than just sitting with it.  Submitting to the page I’m actually on is hard.  Real hard.  It feels very much in conflict with my fight or flight instincts, the ones that have been baked into our DNA since before we made it to the top of the food chain.  All I have is how I show up for the page in front of me, even when showing up sometimes feels like the hardest thing I have ever had to do. 

I don’t like this chapter.  I would not have chosen it in a million years.  It kinda like in book club having to read a book that ya don’t like.  You read it anyway, out of respect for the one who selected it.  This is the book that has been selected for me, and not reading it is not an option, that would be disrespectful of Beautiful Brides memory.  So here I am, slogging away, slower than I want to be moving and this book appears to have a lot of pages to turn.  Some days I make progress, other days I have to go back and reread the shit I didn’t like the first time I read it.  I just keep showing up, and that counts! 

Somewhere in the middle of all of this, I found myself on the same beach where we said our vows again at 20 years in.  Sunrise, the same kind of quiet, the same sounds of the ocean doing its thing.  Only this time it was just me, well technically just me.  I had carried her there and did the only thing  I knew how to do, I let her go into the place we loved.  I don’t know if there are words for that moment that actually do it justice, I had nothing but tears then, and now as I type this.  It did not feel like closure.  It did not fix anything.  But it felt right, the kind of right that comes with absolute certainty.  It felt like one small way to honor the story we had, in a place that knew us well when we were still a we.   I stayed long enough to feel it.  Then I walked away without really knowing how to feel about it.  

Somewhere out there is a version of me who has already read the whole book and knows how it ends.  I don’t get to flip ahead to that part though, I have to read it the way it’s written, page by agonizing page.  Regardless of how many times I reread a page, I am just trying to make it all make sense.  Not every page lands, not every chapter is fair, and it’s still my book to read.  Fair, that reminds me of something she used to say, fair is what ya pay to get on a bus and where ya go to get a funnel cake or corndog.  So I will just keep turning pages, trusting that something will shift along the way and trusting that when I finally reach the end of this chapter, I will understand why I had to read it in the first place.  So I stay, and I keep reading.

Where the Ocean Takes Over the Quiet

Turns out there were a couple of things that I seem to have forgotten about sunrise at the ocean.  Maybe not as much forgot but maybe things I simply had taken for granted since I have experienced them so many times.  Either way, 55 days into my new chapter, I wanted to share some words about the ocean that I somehow had missed.  The first is that transition from the world to the beach that happens on the walk from the car to the ocean.  This stretch of ocean is not new to me, I have taken this walk more times than I can count over the 25 years Bride and I lived here, but it does not feel the same now.  

When I get out of my car, the sounds of the world exist.  Rumbling of cars driving around, the hum of air conditioners, the honking of horns, or maybe the screaming of a siren.  The pitter patter of runners, joggers and walkers and occasionally the dude who asks ya for a few bucks.  There is like a 50 foot stretch on the walk to the ocean in which the sounds of the world start to die down. They are slowly being drowned out by the sound of the ocean. 

I love that transition almost as much as the sunrise.  In those few feet, the transition is also working on my mind, my mood, and I slowly transition to the anticipation of seeing my old friend, the Atlantic.  The drowning out of the day to day of things, and the roaring up of the ocean.  It is almost like two dimmer switches operating in tandem, one going down and the other going up in perfect synchronicity.  Like an emergency generator slewing its phase to  that of the power grid before seamlessly switching back when power is restored.  I had forgotten how much I loved that short bit of the walk.

The spot I went this morning had a huge tidal pool between me and the ocean.  They are funny, and I have no idea how they form.  I am sure the google could answer that for me but sometimes I simply don’t need to know.  Sometimes they are inches deep, other times feet deep.  Today was about 18 inches, almost getting my cargo shorts wet as I walked through.  They are also very cold, I guess that is more from the overnight and the lack of connection to the warm water of the ocean.  The contrast hits harder than I remember. 

It is similar to the feeling of the sand in the morning after a rain.  The sand is cold and  mostly hardened, not the dry warm sand of the day.  I had also forgotten what a natural abrasive the beach can be.  A daily walk on the beach would not doubt save folks thousands of dollars of grinding and polishing our heels and feet before pedicures, which I am getting another one of while I am here.    

Even in winter the water here is always pretty warm, a product of the gulf stream zipping by no doubt.  The first day I was here I sat up on the dry sand, I didn’t even have a towel yet.  I resolved that by immediately buying a folding chair, like the ones at a tailgating party.  I also bought a beach towel, just in case.  Sunday and today I sat in that chair in the surf, both days the tide was coming in.  Generally I would wait until the water was deep enough to hit my butt before sliding back a bit.  Not wanting to be soaking wet, I slid back when it got half way up my calf.

There is absolute relentlessness to the tides, on the way in, it churns pebbles, sea shells and coral into sand.  On the way out, dragging seaweed, kelp and shit dumbasses leave on the beach back into the ocean.  A constant cleansing, grinding up of what was and a renewal of the beach itself by depositing new life.  And the rats with wings keeping all that in balance, I watched this morning as one snatched a small crab up and ate it.

I was surprised how different the transition from the noise of the world to the sound of the ocean hit on these first couple of days.  This beach holds more than sand and ocean for me.  Bride and I actually got remarried here at 20 years in.  There are a lot of memories here for me.  Ya can’t spend that long in a place without it holding pieces of life that ya can’t quite set down.  It was a reminder that the world has not slowed down a bit.  People are still driving too fast, worrying about meaningless things, going to meetings that feel important in the moment, and seem irrelevant five minutes later. 

And I am still in it, doing the dang things that just feel different now.  But somewhere in that walk, there is a subtle shift.  The noise fades just enough, just enough for me to actually feel what’s hidden there.  It’s not louder, just clearer.  Grief has not really shown up for me when everything is loud.  It shows up in that 50 foot window, when things finally get quiet enough that I can’t avoid it. 

And what I am realizing is that I can’t live in either place all the time.  The noise lets me function in the world, and the quiet allows the space to feel all the feels.  That short walk is where both exist at the same time.  It feels like the closest to balancing all of this I have found so far.  Not fixing anything, not escaping anything, just learning how to move between the two in a way that might become manageable.  Kinda like my own two dimmer switches trying to stay in sync, even when the system underneath is rebelling against syncing up.

I also noticed how the tidal pool this morning felt a bit like my grief.  The tidal pools are disconnected from the whole, left behind as the tide goes back to its normal place.  Some are shallow, some are deeper than we expect in the dark, and they are always colder.  That cold hits hard and lingers as we wade through.  Sure, I could have probably walked around it, maybe even picked a different spot on the beach to avoid it, but sooner or later you just have to step on in, without overthinking it.  I don’t understand why some moments hit harder than others or why the water is colder in some areas than in others.  I don’t need a clear explanation for them, how they form or why they stick around or move, I simply accept that they do.

The abrasion bit, that one is real too.  The whole thing is wearing me down in slow, almost unnoticeable ways.  Or maybe not wearing me down as much as forming me into something new. Not anything catastrophic or all at once, just a constant knocking off of the edges and maybe even a bit of polishing.  The routines, the memories, and all the little mundane things that used to be automatic now seem to take more effort than before, all the history always popping in to remind me of my loss.  In some ways I know it’s not all bad, this is a part of the ride for all of us. 

That does not mean it does not suck, and it does not mean we don’t have to keep moving forward.  The friction some days feels like 36 grit on an angle grinder, just whacking away at it all.  Other days it feels like the methodicalness of 1600 grit on a whetstone with a chisel or block plane blade.  Not sure where beach sand lives on the grit scale but I know it is my favorite of grits.  Even walking on partially crushed up shells, I keep moving forward but I am aware of every step.   

The ocean does not rush it, and I am starting to see that I don’t need to either.  The dimmers are still there, one going up and the other going down, just not moving together the way they used to.  And ya know what, Im starting to think that’s not something I need to fix.  Maybe I just need to keep writing my three things, keep taking that walk, and let it find its own rhythm. 

And, all of this sucks.