Lake Erie Yearly Meeting’s annual gathering, for me, has consisted of a dizzying array of different feelings, coming in twos and threes, pretty much non-stop. Part of that is because of having less energy than usual. Part of it is because a big Quaker event is a new situation for me to be in. And still another part of it is about me naturally being an introvert in the first place. These past two days, I’ve just been in a lot of different situations and have been outside of my comfort zone pretty much all the time.

That makes for a rough overall experience. Not because I don’t like the people who have surrounded me—it’s the opposite! I really enjoy hanging out with other Quakers, and the people at this conference are the coolest group of folks I can ever remember attending an event with (and I’ve gone to a lot of conferences). It’s just that everything feels like it’s too much for me to handle. There’s a lot of time built into the daily schedule to spend time building community with each other, and I’m already so emotionally overwhelmed that I tend to avoid those opportunities.

There’s also a LOT on the schedule. We were warned at the orientation to pace ourselves, and they were right. The first thing I could have opted to attend this morning started at 6:45am, and the last thing I could have stayed for ends at 10:30. And let me remind you that the event started on Thursday, and goes until Sunday. If that doesn’t make you exhausted too, then you have a lot more stamina than me to begin with.

So I’ve been trying to give myself a lot of gaps between stuff, and to allow myself space to rest and rejuvenate between social interactions, and it’s all pretty much worn me down to a nub. I went back to the hotel and slept for two hours this afternoon, and that gave me enough energy to spend another five or six hours at LEYM, but I still had to miss the plenary address because I just didn’t have it in me. I did, however, have an excellent wood-fired pizza.

Tonight was also the grief sharing session, and that was really challenging for me. I’m glad I went to it, because it was good for me to hear a lot of what other folks had to say about their own grief journeys. It was also really hard for me to be a part of a group session and not step in and try to facilitate it—I stayed quiet, but had a challenging time being a participant rather than the person in charge. That’s probably just my many years of experience running a suicide loss support group, but is also likely something to do with wanting to distance myself from my own pain and shield myself with my professionalism. There was a wide array of beliefs and theological perspectives that were expressed in the session, and some of them were really upsetting and triggering for me.

That’s bound to happen if you take any random assortment of people and have them discuss something that you’ve been thinking about nonstop for two months, I bet. Keeping my own thoughts and feelings about Kellie separate from the beliefs some folks talked about was hard, and it was also hard not to want to argue with them about some stuff that I thought could actually have been counter-productive to the grieving process of others in the group besides me. But you should all be proud of me for not speaking up even though I wanted to.

All of that took a huge amount of energy from me, when my storage tanks were already close to empty. So I needed to leave the university and take a walk in a nature preserve while having a conversation with myself, or Kellie, or God, or all three. That was a beautiful experience, and I’m really glad I stepped away and took another break.

I don’t want to leave anyone with the impression that I didn’t have beautiful experiences this weekend, because I did. My main reason for wanting to go was to get to see some of our friends from Ann Arbor who we’ve never met in person, and I have been able to get hugs and compassion and love from them all. Mission accomplished. In fact, the conversation I had with someone in the hall immediately after that grief session was worth my trip all by itself. Being told by more than one person that we are family to our Ann Arbor community was deeply meaningful to me. It’s those small moments of community that have really defined the positive aspects of this conference for me.

I went in early this morning for a worship sharing session, and that essentially looks like a small group of folks reflecting on a central theme and then speaking from our own experience about that theme. Today’s query was related to experiences when you’ve been surprised about the impacts of others extending kindness and compassion to you during difficult times.

That gave me the chance to share that I have experienced a staggering amount of kindness from so many people who love Kellie and who love me since she died. But beyond that, that the greatest kindness I have been faced with for the past two months has been the kindness that Kellie touched so many people with while she was alive. The reminders I get from students, her clients, our families, our friends, and others who have known Kellie about how deeply she cared about them and about the ripples of her kindness which have inspired them to be that in others’ lives, in turn.

Someone else in the worship session built off that and spoke at length about several of the times that Kellie helped her and cared for her and made a difference in her life, in both big and small ways. That was really good for me to hear, though it was tough to cry in front of a group of (mostly) strangers.

Kellie would laugh at me if I told her that she was the most loved and most cared-for person ever. She felt like I was out there in the world more than she was, and so she thought she was sometimes just the “and Kellie” part of Matt and Kellie. She didn’t feel like she could ever do enough to make people stay present in her life, and the times when our orbits would intersect with others’ and then swing away for another season were hard times for Kellie. But even as she wasn’t able to internalize the fact that she was so impactful to so many, she was actually making that love, compassion and kindness felt by everyone around her.

My hope is that we can learn a lesson from that: We don’t have to be confident about the difference we make. We just have to do it anyway, and have faith that we are sowing seeds in the world that will outlive us. She did that, and I want to do it too.

I’ve called myself a pragmatist for a long time. I want to make a tangible difference instead of just thinking about abstract concepts. And I believe that imperfect vessels can still be of use. We can do so much good even if we’re not confident, or if we’re not always convicted that we’re walking the correct path, or if we constantly screw up in both big and small ways. I hear people saying all the time that you have to deal with your stuff first if you’re going to be a good social worker, and I think that’s ridiculous. If we had to be perfect to do good work, nobody would be doing any work at all.

So if you take away anything from this today, it’s all about duality. We can enjoy and not enjoy a thing. We can be anxious and brave at the same time. We can do good and feel bad. Isn’t that just being a person?

Until next time,

Matt

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The time has come—I’m at Lake Erie Yearly Meeting, and I’m excited (though also slightly concerned). I made it down to Ashland University and checked in, then headed to my hotel to chill out (literally) and rest. I could have had the entire experience if I stayed in the dorms with lots of other folks, but I’m really glad I opted not to do that. I just get exhausted so much more quickly now than I did just a few months ago, and I need a lot more down time by myself than in the past. I need to keep telling myself that I probably have tons of years to experience this event (though nothing is certain), so I can always do what I can manage and do it differently next year.

I checked in and a friend from Ann Arbor suggested that I join everyone for supper tonight, and I let them know that I’ll be back later but probably will just eat on my own. It’s hard to articulate just how tired contact with other people can make me now. If I offend anyone this weekend by not seeming to be interested in hanging out, I promise it’s not you—I am just far from being “myself”, though maybe this is just who I’ll always be. Who knows. It’s early days still.

Tonight is the orientation for folks who haven’t ever been at the Yearly Meeting, followed by a welcome and introductory session. Pretty laid-back, I suspect (which is what I need anyway). Tomorrow and Saturday have a lot more going on.

On my way down to Ashland, I made a couple of stops. First was at Black Cat Books & Oddities, an incredible bookstore that’s situated in two different houses and has a ton of themed rooms. They have a tree, and a life-size Frankenstein’s monster! I found a signed copy of a book that I’ve wanted anyway, in addition to some puzzle zines from a local Cleveland author which I’m really excited about.

After that, I went to Sweets & Geeks, the coolest candy and nerd stuff store ever. It was really something special. It just kept going on and on, too. Believe me, when I tell you that their candy selection was amazing, it was amazing. I got a few weird things to try out (yes, including some Squashies).

The solitude was really great on the way down—listening to an audiobook as well as some great music, enjoying the new car, and loving the drive. I’m hopeful that the sessions tonight will be nice and that I won’t get more worn out than I can handle. Wish me luck!

XOXO,

Matt

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First and foremost, I’m going to get the chance to meet a bunch of friends who have been in my and Kellie’s lives for nearly five years now, for the first time in-person. That’s obviously a big deal, though I don’t believe you know what you’re talking about if you want to claim that in-person connections are somehow more “real” than virtual ones. It’s about what you’re all bringing to the table, not about where you are geographically-speaking. I have all kinds of close friends who haven’t been in the same place as me for a long time, if ever. You sound like a jerk if you tell me my friendships aren’t as legitimate as yours, so quit it.

I’d also point out that Kellie and I would never have had the chance to spend thirty years together without the strength of our online relationship, which lasted for months before we ever met in-person.

I’m also excited because I love taking trips, and it’s been a while. I’m going to miss Ivy and Coco a ton, but I know that they’ll be okay with my parents watching them.

I also don’t think I’ve taken any vacation days since December-ish. It was a rough few months for us before Kellie died, and I don’t count being devastated for a few days after that happened as “vacation time”. So taking a couple of days off all my various jobs, setting up an email autoresponder, and just being off the grid a little bit sounds pretty awesome to me. The spiritual experience is just icing on the cake.

I am officially packed besides about five items, all of which I plan to use in the night or morning, so I can’t logically pack those things. Packing is very hard for me, since Kellie has been packing for every single trip I’ve taken since I was a literal teenager. She knows everything that might be required in case of an emergency, she has made lists of all the necessities, and they’re all in that bag. Carrying a bag to the car that she’s packed always feels comforting, like she’s watching over me by ensuring I won’t ever need anything I don’t have. But not this time: this time I had to make my own list, which I am sure will be deficient in comparison to hers. I just hope I don’t forget something obvious.

This morning, my dad and I were able to transfer the title of our old car into his name today, which is a good task to have accomplished. I couldn’t find the title, and it turned out that Toyota had never actually sent the letter to the county title folks saying our loan was paid off years and years ago, so our first trip down to try it didn’t work out. I had to convince Toyota to send me a letter saying our loan was paid off and the title was released in order to get a new one, which then allowed me to transfer it to my dad. Anyway, complicated, but all done. I also got my own brand-new license plates for the new car—I could have transferred the old ones, but this is a new start, so new plates felt important.

The big trigger that shocked me most today was when I headed to my library board meeting this evening. I got pretty overwhelmed to remember that Kellie wouldn’t be at home waiting for me to get back after the meeting. Maybe that feels random to you, but I’ve been on the library board for something like eight years. Kellie typically sends me texts throughout board meetings about what the dogs are doing, what she’s up to, and about how she can’t wait for me to pick up a late supper and bring it home with me. This was the first board meeting I’ve gone to since she died, and it kind of messed me up to realize all over again that I won’t be getting any silly texts from her, not today and not ever.

When I leave the house, I’m always kind of expecting to get back there and see her waiting for me when I walk through the door. And she isn’t there, every single time. And yet I still expect to see her. I know she won’t be, but knowing and feeling are different things.

My mom has given me the gift of asking me not to clean up the kitchen and do the dishes tonight, since she’ll do them tomorrow after I leave. That gives me more time to rest and get ready this evening, and that’s a pretty special gift. She has been working so hard to make sure that I’m having restaurant-quality meals at every turn, and I don’t know how she always knows what will be the perfect supper (but she does, every time).

Believe me when I say that nobody gets the opportunity I’ve been given: to spend two months with my parents caring for me like they have. It’s an unbelievable privilege, and I try not to take that lightly. I still screw up and get irritated at small things and act like I’m not grateful sometimes, because I’m not entirely myself these days. I don’t know if I’m ever going to be entirely what I consider “myself” again, since this situation has been so earth-shattering for me. I know who I want to be, but who I want to be is always going to include being half of Matt and Kellie. And that means I’ve been ripped in half, which is an experience that has thoroughly disrupted my sense of self.

Anyway, take care. Expect to hear from me even though I’m traveling, unless I’m just too tired to write tomorrow. We’ll see!

Matt

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You might assume that days when I have a really busy schedule are easier for me, but that assumption would be incorrect. I’ve got so much less energy than I’m used to that busy days are kind of a real slog for me right now. I can make it through, but I’m kind of useless that night. Today was one of those days.

A friend made me cry bright and early this morning (unintentionally) and the tears just kept coming. What really stirred up the most feelings, though, was getting a text reminder just before lunch confirming my dental cleaning in July. If you and I have had a long conversation since Kellie died, you’ve probably heard me bemoan the fact that I have to schedule an appointment at the dentist. It takes months to get on their schedule, and that’s something Kellie always did for both of us. I haven’t had the spoons to bring myself to do that, especially considering the fact that we always went together, never alone. Getting this reminder means that Kellie scheduled dental appointments for both of us before she died and hadn’t had the chance to let me know before she was gone. That act of love from Kellie, scheduling a scary appointment for me so I wouldn’t have to, is just one of the ways she always took care of me. It made me feel so loved, and then almost immediately made me feel utterly bereft, because there can’t possibly be that many things out there that she had set up for me which I haven’t realized yet. This might even be the last one.

There are a finite number of expressions of Kellie’s love left to me, and that is a hard, hard truth to face. I’m crying again just typing these words right now, that’s how hard it is. I’ve been crying off and on all day because of how much it sucks. I know I keep telling people I don’t know how to cope with this, and it’s still true. I keep coping somehow, miraculously, and then the next few minutes arrive and I’m somehow okay for a little bit longer.

The pain is in my heart and in my head and in my chest and in my eyes again (because of all the salt). It’s actual physical pain. Get out of here with your “it’s all in your head” nonsense. The entire world is in your head—it’s very likely that there’s almost no objective truth in the universe—everything is a construct, so shut up.

My pain is even a construct, but it reminds me of what I’ve had—what I have—and so it’s okay, I’ll keep it for now. Maybe forever.

Someone asked me last night if I have a really hard time with ambivalence, in response to my struggles over when I’m okay to see if my parents can head back to Knoxville for a trial run. I’ve thought a lot about that today, and I think that might be the case. I usually know how I feel about a person, or a thing, or a food, or an emotion, or a job, or an ethical dilemma. I can tend to be pretty sure, pretty quickly, about most things. For me to be positive that the girls and I would be fine if my parents went home and also to be positive that that would be a terrifying situation which would be a catastrophic mistake for us all to make is not normal for me. I can’t decide, and I’m uncomfortable when I’m unable to decide things.

Ultimately, it’s going to happen. The girls and I will be alone, or mostly alone, in our house. And we will either be totally fine or totally not fine (or more likely something in the middle). I’ve committed to my parents that I will be honest with them if I need them to drop everything and rush back to Ashtabula, as hard as that might be for me. And I’m willing to make the same commitment to any of my friends who are reading this (or aren’t reading it at all). I’ll tell you if I’m really struggling, even though that is incredibly hard for me to consider doing.

My biggest fear right now is that I won’t have any humans to have a conversation with outside of students, counseling clients, and my therapist. That’s kind of an unbearable thought for me. I’m just so used to talking with Kellie from the time when I wake up to the time I go to sleep that it feels entirely untenable to think about the silence. Would it be too big an ask for me to beg some of you to visit me sometimes, or to just check and see if I want an occasional phone conversation?

I feel a lot of guilt at the thought of being a bother to anybody, especially those of you who have basically put your priorities and lives on hold to accommodate me and my messy situation. I want to tell you all “you didn’t choose for any of this to happen” but then I remember that I didn’t choose for it to happen either. I want to tell you all “your lives are important too, don’t neglect the stuff you care most about so that I can tell you about my silly trip to a bookstore”, but then I get scared that I’ll convince everyone to back off and disappear. There’s that ambivalence again. Argh.

Thank you for making space in your life for me.

I think I mentioned that someone advised me right after Kellie died to start keeping track in a notebook of the meals that people bring and the encouraging texts people send and the nice stuff people say to me so that I can thank everyone once all this is over. But here’s the deal, folks: I couldn’t possibly thank everyone for the kindness I’ve received across these last two months. I am going to have to spend the rest of my life thanking you all. It’s incredibly overwhelming to think of anyone believing that I am keeping track of all of this, and equally overwhelming to believe that anyone could think I’m not constantly blown away by gratitude at everything. I am so grateful.

And I’m also pretty sure that “all this” is never going to be “over”.

But thank you for not letting me be alone (so far) and thank you for making me cry (accidentally) and thank you for ignoring my nonsense when I don’t give myself the benefit of the doubt that I would literally give every other human being on the planet.

XOXO,

Matt

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I had a succession planning meeting with a committee for the library board, an advising meeting with a student, a counseling session, and more work stuff.

That still gave me enough time to get a burger from Evie’s Luau (extremely worth it if you haven’t tried one of those yet, which I hadn’t) and a dirty soda from Mamba’s. This summer, food trucks have been at Smith Field every Monday, if you’re local to me and didn’t know that already. Support local small businesses!

I spent time overlooking the Smolen Bridge and then headed down to vacuum sand out of my car from last week.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what someone online said about his grief experience, and wanted to talk about that today.

He said that he tends to divide his life into two periods of time: time with his wife and time after she died. For me, that rings true, but I’d add one other era in there:

• Childhood

• My years with Kellie

• Whatever comes next

My time as a kid was a significant chunk of my life, obviously. That era lasted until I was 18 and met Kellie. I learned a lot and definitely grew a lot as a person during that period of time, though I didn’t know all that much about myself.

My time with Kellie lasted from 18 to 48, and ended almost two months ago. Those thirty years involved a lot of uncertainty and sadness and confusion. But Kellie was there with me through all of those challenges. Kellie helped me to figure out who the heck I even am. She was my biggest supporter, and we shared every single thing together. I went from being a kid to (I guess) an adult during this era. I found social work. I got my associate’s, a double-major bachelor’s, and a master’s degree during this era, along with an independent chemical dependency and an independent social work license. I discovered my love of teaching and live music and cooking. I got tattoos! And dog! And we bought our house, too!

Now I’ve lost Kellie, and I’m in the third section of my life. It’s become clear to me that I need to recognize and acknowledge and live like I’m in a new phase of my life. I shouldn’t pretend that one thing (Kellie) has changed. Like I mentioned yesterday, many or most things are now different. Yes, I’ve lost things, but it’s not just loss: it’s change.

I don’t think I know anybody who would say that they like change. You’ve probably heard people say that all change is stressful, whether positive or negative. And of course that’s also a part of living, so that presents a conundrum. Do we rage against the change, or pretend it hasn’t happened? Do we embrace the change? Do we sit with the change and try to surf that wave, even amidst our discomfort?

Another piece of the puzzle for me is that embracing the change is also going to carry a great deal of guilt with it, since on some level that symbolizes being okay with Kellie’s death or even being happy about it. Maybe that’s not true, but that’s how it feels, and that means it might as well be true.

There’s also the risk of me spending so much time in my memories of my past with Kellie that I’m stuck living in the past. I don’t want that to happen either. Although those memories are wonderful and many of them represent the best times of my life so far, they’re also not where I need to be all the time, every day, as I try and move forward. It’s such a weird thing to think that I don’ t get to make any new memories with Kellie—that all the movies we’ve watched and books we’ve read and songs we’ve sung along with together and all the road trips we’ve been on are all that we will ever have.

I saw a book in one of the bookstores I visited yesterday that I know was on Kellie’s list. She had been waiting for a while for it to finally get published, and I don’t like the fact that she will never get the chance to read it. I also noticed a couple of books that she had read in pre-release form to review but never got around to writing her reviews for—now that’ll never happen. I try not to dwell on those “never happen” things too much, because there’s no way to resolve that sadness in a positive fashion—it’s just a fact, you know?

So as I enter this new era of my life, I want to do it with a view toward the future—toward the things I want to accomplish and want to experience. I want to continue to make a difference in the world and have a positive impact and keep making tiny changes where I can. But to do that, I need to figure out what I want. What do I need to be happy? What are sources of joy and contentment for me, now that I have to replace Kellie across so many different domains of my life?

She served in those roles for so long that it’s really challenging to consider other sources of support and love and joy besides turning to her for all of those things.

As my parents and I turn our thoughts toward what it would look like for them to head back to Knoxville for a bit and see how things go with me and the girls on our own, I’ve also started to make a list of what I need to be healthy without them here.

I would appreciate it if you guys continue to check in on me. I think it would help me to have actual conversations with people more often, without my parents here, not just exchanging text messages. If I don’t have a human being to talk to in a given day outside of work, that might be a really isolating feeling for me. So whether that looks like a phone call or you stopping by to chat, I’d appreciate that kind of contact as well.

I’m just so used to a constant running conversation throughout the course of each day with Kellie, and so that might be the scariest part of my parents not being here, in terms of the loneliness piece. A counseling session is definitely a time of genuine human connection, but it can’t replace a conversation with someone who loves me.

I’m also thinking about trying to get into some kind of routine for the dogs and I, to help the time go by and make sure I don’t forget important stuff. I’m pretty sure I’ll remember to feed both myself and the girls, but the drinking water part is still something I often forget.

I don’t know what else I need, but I do know that Kellie will still be a major part of my life no matter what this era looks like. I intend to live my life in a way that will honor her and the lessons she taught me, and also (as you’re probably getting tired of me saying) we’re still married, in my brain anyway if not in the eyes of the state of Ohio. I’m always going to love her, and I’m always going to miss her. There just also has to be something else beyond the missing, something to strive for and challenge myself with, something to anticipate and look forward to, and something to be proud of. I can’t live in the last era in my head, when I’m literally not there in real life anymore.

Thanks for listening, and thanks for helping me figure this stuff out. If you’ve had a conversation with me about pretty much anything over the last two months, it’s helped me. I promise.

Love you guys,

Matt

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While I was in Cleveland anyway, I figured I’d stop by the Roaming Biscuit (an excellent biscuit-themed restaurant we’ve wanted to try for a while). I was lucky enough to be able to get myself one of their brisket, egg and cheese sandwiches, which apparently often sell out. Having eaten one, I can tell you why they often sell out (it was absolutely delicious).

I then headed over to Visible Voice Books to mark another independent bookstore off my list. Kellie and I have traveled to Visible Voice a ton of times, but never in their new location. It was absolutely wonderful! If you haven’t been, and you like books, you should give Visible Voice a shot. They’re in Tremont and have food and coffee and an awesome upstairs area for sitting and reading or chatting, along with a very cool amphitheater for readings and other types of events.

I was surprised at how huge they are, as well as by the great collection and on-point staff recommendations (which they had at the old location as well). Ten out of ten, honestly. I’ll be back, even if they don’t give me a prize for going there.

It was a nice morning/early afternoon jaunt. I got to listen to an audiobook while I drove, and I was only gone from the dogs for a few hours and was back by two-ish.

Once back home, I was able to get some cleaning done (which exhausted me within about twenty minutes, as is my new normal). After that Coco and Ivy and I took a nap during the huge thunderstorms.

I’m relieved that today was a good Sunday, since it means I’m capable of both consecutive good days and of having a good Sunday in the first place. It was both restful and included a short adventure.

I didn’t cry much today, although Kellie and I had a good conversation. You know, I spoke and she (hopefully) listened. That kind of conversation. I spent some time trying to convince my brain to dream about her during my nap, but I’m apparently not skilled enough at making myself dream things on command, and it didn’t work. I’ve still only had that one dream where we hung out and had a conversation, though I fairly regularly feel like she’s behind or next to me in bed when I’m between awake and asleep.

I was marveling today at the fact that I still remember very clearly what it feels like to hold Kellie’s hand. Even though this week will mark two months since she died, those kinds of physical memories of her presence are persisting with me, which I hope I can manage for as long as possible. I have enough videos and photos of her that I can easily remember what her voice sounds like, and what her laugh sounds like, and what she looks like. But the physical touch piece is something I can’t refresh my memories of, so it’s type of memory that is likeliest to go away, and that makes me sad sometimes.

My favorite two types of touches by her, in all the years we’ve been together, were when she would put her arm around my headrest while we were driving in the car and ruffle the hair on the back of my head and when I would put my hand on her leg in the car and she’d put her hand over mine and hold my hand from behind it. Those two are the ones I miss the most. That, and the feeling of rubbing her feet every night before bed, as well as holding her hand every night when we drifted off to sleep. We did that for many, many years.

I’ve lost so much, guys. And I don’t know how I’m going to make it for years and years without Kellie here. I just don’t. At the same time, I’ve made it almost two months, and I would have told you that was impossible too, before I lived through it.

Sometimes we get flabbergasted by just how much we can survive. Not in a “God won’t give us too much to handle” sense, but in a “strength looks like all kinds of things, and so does survival” sense.

I don’t know how to live without holding Kellie’s hand, but I’m still doing it, somehow.

Have a good night, and I hope you’ll join me in trying to make next week as good as we can, despite all the horrors.

Matt

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I scattered some of her ashes there today, because Kellie loved being there so much. It felt like the right thing to do.

It was Coco’s first time on a major outing, and she was NOT well-behaved when we tried to make her sit anywhere besides my lap in the driver’s seat. But all three dogs did great when we got there. They also got to eat (plain) hot dogs as well, which was a very special treat for our girls.

There are always going to be places that hold memories for me, and that’s not always a bad or sad thing. My dad asked me today if Kellie’s fondness for the place made it harder or easier to visit Presque Isle, and I honestly think it’s neither. It definitely held a reverent feel for me, like a holy place, because of all the memories. So maybe it’s a religious site for me after all.

Just a short one for today. I’m just feeling my feelings tonight. Not good or bad ones, just feelings.

XOXO,

Matt

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Given that goal, I decided to head out to another independent bookstore today and see if it made for another great afternoon. Because I figured, why not? Maybe I’m capable of two in a row, who knows?

I really struggled for a bit late last night. Since it was close enough to midnight, I’m going to say it doesn’t detract away from my ‘yesterday was a good day’ judgment. I just started thinking about how Kellie and I have gotten to this point in our lives where we could worry less about money. It just started to get to me how unfair it was that now I need to create a budget. I know that’s a very privileged problem to have. It’s just that I dislike budgeting so much—I hate it. The idea of being okay financially, for both of us, has always been that we don’t have to worry every day about overdrafting our bank accounts.

Budgeting is something that I’ve always found hard to stay focused on. And I’ve been spending more money than usual since Kellie died. That’s probably due to a number of reasons—part of it isn’t my fault. It is more expensive to be depressed! It ends up a lot more expensive to buy your food than to muster up the energy to cook it. It is more expensive when you have guests in your home to buy groceries (just more mouths to feed). Expenses go up when you’re creating a brand new garden and have to buy mulch and plants, etc. There are all kinds of reasons for more costs these last couple of months than there will be in a world when I reach whatever new normal.

That said, I was reading one of the comments on the widower discussion boards, and the person helped me put some of these financial concerns in a new frame when he said that overspending has been a challenge for him since his traumatic loss. That started me thinking about how I am probably seeking out more comfort in things that I am buying than I normally would, as some kind of unconscious self-medicating mechanism. It would make sense for me to be trying to make myself feel better by buying something (like cookies—did you know how good Cheryl’s cookies are?). I don’t say this because I’m embarrassed about it, or because I need you to hold me accountable for my spending habits.

No, I’m saying it because I’ve committed to being transparent here, or at least vulnerable. And as I think about the things that have been a challenge for me, this is one of them. I’m going to try and figure out ways that I can live within my means now that my means are smaller. It sucks, it’s not fair, but it is the reality into which I have been placed.

I now get to live off of whatever I make, and I don’t have another income to help out for the first time in 30 years. Kellie had been working since she was fifteen! I’m in a pretty unfamiliar situation. I haven’t had to just pay rent by myself since a brief period in 1996, so it’s been a while. I wish it wasn’t a consideration. I wish I could just be comfortable in knowing that I’m going to be fine, and I have enough income coming in to not have to think about it. But just as I don’t have someone else to help me buy toiletries when I forget, now I don’t have somebody else to do the budgeting and to make sure that the bills are getting paid. So making the money falls to me, spending the money wisely falls to me too, and I can still spend plenty of money while trying to make sure I have the money to cover my monthly expenditures. It made for an upsetting late night, though, as I convinced myself that I’m now imminently destitute. Which I’m not, but we don’t do our best thinking after midnight, do we?

Today, I got a lot of work done in preparation for the fall semester. After that, I figured I’d seek out another independent bookstore from my list.

This one is called Loganberry Books, and it was so cool. It was a recommendation from my therapist, so it would be on her if it sucked, but it definitely did not suck. I really liked it there. There were all kinds of employee recommendations, and both new and used books (in addition to some pretty valuable rare ones). The staff were friendly and knowledgeable, and the store itself was beautiful. Lots of nooks and crannies full of very good books. I could have spent a lot more time in there, but I’ll be back.

After that, I started thinking about places to go grab a bite to eat and realized that Luna Bakery, probably Kellie’s favorite bakery in the world, was only a mile away. I had no idea!

I got a roast chicken, feta, and spinach crepe because crepes were a huge joy in Kellie’s life (though she would have gotten a banana and Nutella one instead). I also brought home a few macarons because, again, Kellie sure loved them. I enjoyed eating there in her memory.

I feel good about having done another solo adventure. I’ll also have you know that I only got myself one book (I could have bought many more than that). They said to come back during my birthday month because then I get to pick a free book out of the birthday box. I don’t know what’s in the birthday box, but I said I will, and I plan to.

The drive gave me lots of time to listen to audiobooks and music, and also to talk to Kellie. Talking to her is something that I do pretty often these days, though not as often as I did when she was still alive.

I don’t know what the future brings. I’m hopeful for a lot of it, though. I know that I want to be here. I know that I deserve to be happy. The hole that Kelly leaves in my life is just a never-ending pit of sadness and despair, and if I spend too much time thinking about her absence, it’s hard to climb back up out of it. You kind of just sink deeper and deeper. There’s no bottom to it because there’s no way that I can fix it, and there’s no way that I can have her back with me now. It’s a better thing to do to dip my toe in every now and then, but not to stand full-fledged in that pit. So that’s what I do. Like putting the tip of your tongue into the socket where a tooth used to be. Just sometimes. Just often enough to remind you that it’s still there. Not often enough to give you an infection or actually hurt yourself.

This is so hard, and I miss her so much, and I don’t know what I’m going to do to be happy in the long term. I suspect it’s going to take a lot of intention, and I’m up for the challenge. I hate it, but I don’t have a choice, so that’s where I’m at.

Hey, have a good rest of your night. And I hope you have the best weekend ever.

Talk to you soon,

Matt

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I spent some time today talking through a lot of logistics related to my program. Each summer, the field education coordinator and I meet to review outcomes, address programmatic issues, plan for the next academic year, get ready for the next crop of interns and interviews to formally admit students into the program, etc. It was a good meeting, and we got a lot accomplished. I really appreciate getting to work with her, because we’re on the same page more than we aren’t. And even when we aren’t, we treat each other with respect, which is more than I can say for plenty of folks I’ve worked with in the past.

I also got some feedback that at one of the campuses where my program resides, some of the staff feel that we’re too social work-oriented in how we treat our students. I’m going to take that as a huge compliment: if you feel that I’m such a super committed social worker that I treat students with the same level of compassion, respect and kindness that I would put into my clients, then I am doing exactly what I want to be doing.

Much of my day was also taken up by Lindsay, a dear friend who has been very present in my life since Kellie died, and who has been a very important part of Kellie’s life since the 1980s. I told her today that one of my biggest fears is that our friends will fade away and leave me alone over time, because that’s something many widow/ers report happening. Now that it’s been nearly two months since she died, it’s still a daily reality for me and for her family, but everyone else would be well within their rights to move on to their own priorities and their own lives. But if that did happen, it would be incredibly challenging for me, and I’m not ashamed to admit it. I’m used to having hours of conversation every single day with Kellie, and if I had nobody to talk to day after day after day, I don’t know how I could cope with that.

But Lindsay has been here with me, for my good days and my bad ones. So have lots of you guys, and I don’t know how to thank you all enough. She has committed to me that she won’t disappear, and that means so, so much.

Lindsay and I grabbed coffee and then went for a long walk on the beach (because the rain had stopped and the sun was out in full force). We got lunch from a food truck, too. It all made for a day which kept me from spending too much time sitting in the noise of my brain, which I cannot recommend to anybody.

We looked for beach glass (well, she did and I tried to help). But the main thing I was busy with was walking in the water, feeling the sun on my shoulders and the sand under my feet. It was so nice to just wander down the beach with no immediate destination in mind while we talked, and I don’t think I could have had a nicer time if I consciously tried to plan something.

I’m feeling like I can sometimes interact with people without just crying the whole time, which is progress for me.

My dad continued his incredible work in the garden, my mom made us the best sweet and sour chicken ever for supper, and Coco and Ivy and Bruno also had a good time all day.

There’s really only one major thing that might have made it a better day, and that’s the one thing that would make every single minute better. But none of us can do anything about that, so all we can do is do our best to not focus on it.

Anyway, I’m pretty happy, the people around me are pretty happy, and tomorrow is Friday.

Take care,

Matt

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I may not have dated anybody other than Kellie as an adult, but I’ve interacted with at least thousands of unattached women across the last thirty years. None of them had anything like the emotional attraction to me that Kellie has for all this time. I have a ton of female-identifying friends, and have always felt far more comfortable around women than men due to not being a stereotypically guy-ish guy. But Kellie has always been one of a kind for me, and that means there was a potential future where she and I never met and I never found someone I fit with as well as I have with her.

As most of you know, I grew up many thousands of miles away in the Philippines. Kellie and I would literally have never found one another if not for the power of the internet to bridge the geographical distances between us all. It’s pretty mind-blowing, if you stop and think about it.

I had never visited Ohio before I came to see her. She may have gone to Kentucky at some point, but never when I was there at the same time. There were so, so many opportunities for us to never find each other.

And listen: if you feel that you don’t have just one person you’re meant for, that’s okay. If you feel that there might be several out there, or even that there are zero out there, that’s okay. I’m not the boss of you, and I don’t get to decide that for you. But for me, there’s one person, and that’s her.

Ivy needed a trip to the vet today for her allergies—it turned out that the reason her allergy medicine wasn’t helping was because she has a yeast infection and maybe a bacterial one as well. She got an antibiotic shot and also needs a specialty compounded prescription because she’s so small that there’s no oral dose little enough for her. Holding steady at 6.4 pounds! She was very good at the vet, even though she was very nervous, and so she got two Wendy’s chicken nuggets as a special reward.

One of our friends shared a really special card with me that Kellie had sent her a few years ago. She commented that Kellie was so encouraging all the time, and always saw the best in a person, which is true. It made me consider just how much I miss that encouragement now that she’s gone. When you hear it all the time, every single day, it doesn’t fade into the background. It still means a lot. But it’s normal, right? And now that I don’t have that constant encouragement from one source, I need to get it from a whole lot of friends and family who have all given me pieces of that love and support over these past seven weeks. The friend went on to say that that part of Kellie lives on in my heart and in hers, and so it’s up to all of us to keep being Kellie to other folks. Which was deeply touching to me, and made me cry for a bit. But she’s right, so please go and do that.

The single thing I feel the most gratitude for, looking over the totality of my life so far, is that I found Kellie and she found me. Even in my worst moments, I will always have that.

XOXO,

Matt

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I succeeded in not getting that sad for a significant portion of my day, and I’m going to call that a win.

I’ve been giving myself some fun tech projects to keep my brain busy, which is probably why there aren’t many concrete physical artifacts to prove that I did lots of work—but I KNOW I did lots of work. I’m setting up my own personal cloud server so that I can stream my music to myself wherever instead of paying Apple or Amazon or some other company for the right to do that, given the fact that I’ve already bought it. And who has two thumbs and wants to figure out how to stop paying for iCloud space every month for the rest of his life? This guy.

The dogs had an excellent training session this afternoon—the trainer worked miracles with Sage and Ivy back in the day, so I’m hopeful that she’ll be able to help me get Coco on track as well. The main thing is working with her on acceptable boundaries for her behavior, and don’t we all need to learn about acceptable boundaries for our behavior? Coco certainly does, at any rate.

I’m sitting here at 10pm and realizing that I’m actually feeling okay. It’s that time of night when I usually sink into deep despair (if I’m going to), and I’m happy to report to you all that I’m feeling okay tonight.

“Feeling okay” doesn’t mean “feeling better than ever, bud”, but it still means “feeling okay”, and that’s another win.

I had another excellent class tonight. I swear, this group of social work students is really on the ball this summer. Either that or my perspective about who is trying hard is temporarily skewed by the fact that I’m trying hard myself, so any effort at all resonates with me as being good enough. No matter which of those is accurate, I’m happy to be teaching this class, and I wrap up each Tuesday night full of joy at the fact that I get paid to spend time educating these folks. It’s a really good job.

I have a literal truckload of mulch occupying a significant portion of my driveway this evening, and with any luck Kellie’s garden is going to look even more awesome by this time tomorrow night (as long as the rain holds off).

My dad is spending a tremendous amount of effort to make this garden a tranquil spot for folks to sit and contemplate Kellie and what she’s meant to them. It is a real testament to his patience and perseverance that he continues to spend hours out there every single day.

My mom is spending her own tremendous amount of effort to cook all my favorite meals from childhood, day after day after day. It’s been a real shock to my system to see each new meal appear, scrumptious, comfort-inducing, magical.

It is a humbling experience to have them here. Humbling because I’m not doing much to host them besides paying for stuff every now and then. I mean, they live in my house, and I guess I usually pay the utilities. But it’s a very different scenario to have your parents come to take care of you in the midst of a crisis. If I’m doing okay most days, it’s due in large part to the fact that every Wednesday, my dad washes my laundry. And that once or twice a week, my mom makes a meal plan and grocery list. And that I have people to talk to in the morning, and again at lunch, and then again at supper and afterward. The dogs and I need that right now. I hope that we don’t always need it and that they can carry on with their own life and their own priorities at some point. But for now it’s lifesaving stuff.

I could never have anticipated that any of this was going to happen in my life, and I wouldn’t have wanted to believe it even if I could anticipate it, so there are multiple levels of defense mechanism one has to make it through to believe that a scenario like this is ever going to pop up in any of our lives. And yet, here it is, sitting on my chest like a rhinoceros whenever I think about Kellie not just being temporarily gone. I’m always able to almost believe she might walk around the corner any minute, even now.

Tomorrow is the seven week mark since she died, and it still feels just as fresh. I’m still just as surprised when I walk into our bedroom and see some of her stuff missing. I’m still always looking for her around the table at each meal, or making sure her car seat is cleaned off so she can sit in it, or. The list goes on long enough to almost not qualify as a list at all. It feels more like this alternate dimension I find myself in could fade away any second. I know it won’t, I know this is real life, I’m not delusional. But I halfway wish it would anyway. Looking at her photos tonight, I’m struck by how much I would give away in order to have her back (or, put another way, by how little I would need to be deliriously happy if she were just here). But she’s not, nobody’s offering me that deal anyway, and then the moment passes.

I hope your week is going well, and I hope you’re resting somewhere with someone you love. I am too, but she’s awfully quiet. This whole house is awfully quiet. Time to turn on some loud music, do the dishes, and hope I don’t wake my parents.

XOXO,

Matt

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I did write a whole thing, but I didn’t ultimately feel like editing and uploading it, so I decided not to. Yay for healthy boundaries! I AM sorry if not publishing made you worry about me, but if that ever happens, just ask me.

Yesterday was the worst day I’ve had in a long time. It’s probably the worst day I’ve had since the first week after she died (besides the day of her funeral). And no, I’m not going to assume that’s because Saturday was such a great day, and I’ll tell you why:

I think it would be really counterproductive for me to get it into my head that a good day must equal a bad day in order to balance out the universe in some way. I don’t feel like I did something wrong by having a good day, so I don’t feel the need to punish myself in some way by having an equally bad one right afterward. I think it’s fair to say there’s just no way to predict what’s going to be a good one and what’s going to suck. So I just need to wake up, do my best, and see what type of day is ahead of me, good or bad.

The morning was really hard because I came across the last Valentine’s Day card she gave me, that made me break down in tears for a while. I’ve talked in the past about just how weird time’s passage is to me right now. Things go so slowly compared to what I’m used to, and that’s a real challenge for me. Beyond that, I find myself calculating how much time we had left together for each milestone or date or card or memory I come across, and wishing we had known so that we could have made it more special in the time we had remaining to us. You know how, when you wake up in the middle of the night, it’s hard to avoid calculating how much longer you get to sleep before you need to get up for work? It’s the same deal, only I find myself calculating how much time we had from then until the day she died.

On Valentine’s Day this year, we had 67 days left. But we didn’t know it. We had a good day! But it wasn’t the most spectacular Valentine’s Day ever, because we didn’t know it was our last one. There was just no way to know, and that’s the impossibly challenging thing for me.

We hadn’t taken any big amount of time off this year yet, because Kellie was getting all her clients re-established in the private practice and we were looking forward to spending more time together this summer. I think pretty continually about every meeting I attended instead of just watching TV with her, or about every time we got into a stupid argument that could have been avoided, or every time I made us grab lunch somewhere that I liked and she didn’t. I have a ton of regrets. I have text messages from her asking me if I could cancel a class and just take the day off to rest and relax with her and the dogs—and I didn’t do that, hardly ever. I felt a responsibility to go to the meeting or teach the class or do whatever I was scheduled to do, and I wish I had cancelled all of those things and just cuddled with her every single day instead.

I know that it isn’t my fault, I know that it couldn’t have been prevented or predicted, and I know that I don’t ultimately have to take responsibility for any of this. All of those things are completely true and I know all of them very well on a cognitive level, but not an emotional one. So getting into that headspace is an easy thing for me. And when I do that, I have a hard time moving on from it.

There are always going to be obligations! There are always going to be regrets! But these regrets are truly such a messy, messy thing for me at the moment.

A friend and her daughter came by to tour Kellie’s garden and say hi, and that was really great and kept me going for a few hours. But then came the afternoon.

Want to know the hardest thing from yesterday? Just as a great example of how we cannot choose our triggers? The thing that made me lose it a little bit and have to spend an hour in my bedroom regaining my composure? This is so silly, but it’s the truth: a can of baked beans.

If you’ve spent a lot of time with Kellie, you probably know that she LOVED her baked beans. Baked beans were what she made for every holiday and every picnic and every potluck. She eventually trusted me to make them, sometimes, although I’m telling you that hers were far better than mine. It was just her specialty for her entire adult life. And yesterday, my mom was making dinner and wanted to make baked beans as a side dish. She couldn’t find any baked beans in the pantry, and neither could my dad, so I went and look for myself (and there ultimately weren’t any). That’s when I needed to take a very long time by myself in order to get it back together again.

You have to understand that one way she would try to encourage me to make things she REALLY liked is by just adding them to our online shopping cart. She loved my zucchini bread, and so every few weeks she’d buy some cans of pineapple and some coconut and a couple of zucchini. I’d see it all in the grocery order and that would let me know that she’d been missing zucchini bread, so I’d make a mental note to bake her some. Baked beans were the same. So every week or two, she’d buy us another large can or two of Bush’s baked beans (the vegetarian kind, so it wouldn’t have the gross hunk of fat in it). One of us would then use them as a base to make our own baked beans. We have had so many arguments because she bought MORE baked beans and there were already plenty of them in the pantry. There have been times we’ve had ten cans of them in there, seriously.

For us to be entirely out of Bush’s baked beans means that she is gone. Nobody is going to buy those unless I do, and nobody is going to ask me for them, because she’s gone. It’s just one more part of her absence, and just one more example of how I don’t have her to buy any of the essentials she kept us stocked up with. When I run out of paper towels (another argument we often had), we’ll just be out. There won’t be a box of them already in the mail on its way here, or a Wal-Mart delivery coming later tonight. Every roll of paper towels, every can of baked beans, every bag of dog treats, is going to need to be something that I order in order to have it in my house. And that’s a really hard pill for me to swallow.

I know the baked beans aren’t ultimately a big deal. What it signifies, however, IS. I never know what’s going to be a big deal, which means that the world is now full of land mines for me. I’m sorry that sometimes, the people who love me get exposed to some of that shrapnel by accident. I’ll keep apologizing, and please keep loving me. Also please remember that it’s not your fault for introducing me to one of those land mines—death is the asshole, not you. I promise.

This morning, I ate breakfast at a park. I’m starting to really enjoy doing that. I met my financial planner for a quick coffee, did some work, saw a counseling client, and then ate lunch in a different park. If you didn’t know, Cove Creek BBQ (where Tony’s Deli used to be) sells cute little Heavenly Creamery ice creams! So I was able to eat a pulled pork sandwich and dulce de leche ice cream while watching the lake. All three of those things were lovely. Can highly recommend.

So today was a vast improvement compared to yesterday, which was a relief. Progress doesn’t look linear—and sometimes it doesn’t even look like progress at all. But as I’ve told my clients for decades, progress is progress. We don’t have to strive for perfect if we just keep putting one foot in front of the next. That’s my plan, anyhow.

Keep on walking,

Matt

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For the first time since Kellie died, I had an entirely good day.

Of course there were tears, there were conversations with Kellie, and there were plenty of moments that included sadness.

But I had a day without any real bad stretches—and I can honestly say it was a completely good one. That’s a relief, since I didn’t know for sure that I was still capable of having those.

When I got home, I also read more than a hundred pages of one of my new books (not pictured). That was a really big deal for me as well, and another first in this new reality I’m inhabiting.

If I can have a good day, you can too. Why not try to make that happen for you tomorrow? I’ll give it a shot myself again as well, and we can compare notes and see how it goes.

Love you.

Matt

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I bought a car today! Honestly— we bought a car today, since Kellie put money into that retirement account for a decade and without it I wouldn’t have been able to afford a huge down payment.

Kellie and I aspired to own a hybrid car for the past twenty years, give or take. It didn’t happen in 2006, because we couldn’t bear the thought of buying a Prius without test driving one first (and that was how you had to buy them back then). It didn’t happen again in 2016, because we wanted a hybrid Camry to replace our existing Camry, and we couldn’t afford one at that point.

But today, Kellie and I bought that 2026 hybrid Camry, and I’m really happy about it.

This car represents so much more than looking fancy. Just like our new path, which is both functional (because we walk on it) and symbolic (because it’s representative of my determination to invite visitors into my home and thus stave off some of my new loneliness), this car is more than a car to me.

As I have pondered what I can do to make this new life tolerable and survivable, at least past the here and now, I keep coming back to the importance of having things (both big and little) to look forward to. People never fail to remind me of just how many things are going to keep triggering me for the rest of my life. The dates and seasons and birthdays and holidays and sunsets and sunrises and food and every single part of my life is a trigger for me now. So having something coming up that I don’t have to dread is a concrete link from here to then, and will provide me with some joy.

I feel better about some of the trips I’m planning to take now that I have a brand-new car loaded with safety features to get me there in one piece. And it’s just a far better overall experience to go anywhere in a nicer vehicle. Anyway, I am deeply grateful to be able to buy this car with payments that will not destroy my monthly budget, even without Kellie’s income.

I’m thinking about small stuff, like restaurants I’ve always wanted to try or independent bookstores I’ve always wanted to spend an hour or two browsing. Nothing massive that would take me away from Coco and Ivy for any length of time, really, but I’m finding myself excited about the chance to see different things that won’t automatically remind me of Kellie, for even just a few minutes.

Another thing which was a big deal about this car purchase is the fact that Kellie was the skeptical one, especially for expensive things like this. The buying process was lovely, but the financing process was not (and not because of my credit, that’s top-tier at the moment). Having to negotiate extended warranties and service plans and all the tiny details and intricacies around the paperwork was incredibly draining for me, since I have never done anything like it without her here to be the bad cop.

Those of you who don’t know Kellie well have likely just heard about how kind and compassionate and loving she was, and all of that is true. BUT. She was also the most savvy negotiator I have ever met, and she would not take a hard sell lying down. I’m too trusting and too easily-distractible to stay focused on the details of transactions like this. It was a brand-new experience for me, and one I did not enjoy at all. I’m so glad it’s done, though, and also so glad for the freedom of movement it will now offer me.

If you have a recommendation for a restaurant that has something special within a few hours of Ashtabula, let me know. Likewise if you have a recommendation for an independent bookstore I need to check out, particularly one that specializes in fantasy and science fiction. I’m hopeful that I can regain my ability to read if I’m surrounding myself with new books—we’ll see if that’s true or not.

I had a rough time today with something completely stupid, which is pretty typical for me. I’m just so tired of things which aren’t even that important to me making me cry in public. I know—it’s part of the deal—but it still sucks to an incredible degree.

We’re planning a celebratory supper tonight, because my parents have a new car (our old Camry), I have a new car, and my mom got some wonderful medical news today. All things to celebrate, all happy things.

I bet I still cry way more than I want to this evening. Keep up the positive vibes, prayers, holding me in the light, etc. Anything positive you’d like to send my way, I will gladly and graciously accept from you. It can’t hurt, and might help a bunch.

Hugs,

Matt

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Still, if I stub my toe you can comfort me because you have probably stubbed your toe before. That makes sense, even though you don’t feel the same exact thing I do, and maybe never have.

So I’m arguing that some of the things I’m going through can be understood by you on some level, because you’ve probably experienced a loss yourself at some point. Maybe even the loss of a spouse or long-term partner. So you can discern the outlines of my pain, even if you don’t exactly feel my pain. And that’s good, because I don’t want you to feel this pain! It sucks! But it sure would be nice to be understood sometimes, regardless.

There’s a difference between you understanding a piece of my pain and grasping some of what I’m going through and laying it over your own feelings about this loss, any loss, or comparing those losses in general. It’s not a contest, and my pain isn’t necessarily any worse or any more valid than yours. When people tell me that their sadness about Kellie’s death doesn’t really matter because my grief matters more, it makes me really sad. Because grief is grief is grief—nobody gets a trophy for having the worst grief, and we’re not in a competition here.

There’s also a difference between you understanding decisions that I’m making or decisions that I plan to make and deciding whether you would make the same ones yourself. I’m talking about myself. I am entitled to my own choices and you are entitled to yours. I’m not even judging you for feeling led to go a different path than me—that’s fine. The world is full of an infinite diversity of human beings, and we are not all going to make the same life choices. I’m glad about that, because those same life choices aren’t the right ones for each of us.

I have been saying this for six weeks, and I plan to keep saying it, at least until people can grasp that I am serious and not just having a knee-jerk response: I chose to be with Kellie forever. I made that declaration publicly in two different wedding ceremonies twenty years apart, and that declaration privately to her at least a thousand times. “Forever” is not something I take lightly or something that somehow stopped when Kellie died. I am not interested in having any romantic partners other than her.

What is it about this decision that makes folks so uncomfortable? This isn’t about anybody else and what is right for them. It is about Kellie and I. You don’t need to decide if my choice is okay with you based upon what you would do—I give you my blessing to make your own judgment call based upon what you feel is right for you. I’m just frustrated that this same compassion and acceptance cannot be extended to me. If people are happy when someone makes a long-term commitment to a person, why wouldn’t they also be happy when someone chooses to maintain that long-term commitment even after death?

I guess what I’m saying is that if we celebrate that lifestyles can vary from person to person and that there are many different ways of finding happiness, can’t people just celebrate that I am planning to pursue joy in my life in ways other than finding a new partner? I am not intending to wear ashes and sackcloth, I am not intending to bury myself in an anthill or self-flagellate with a whip to make myself suffer. I will not be wearing black (any more than is typical for me). But I will also not be in a romantic relationship with anybody else.

I fully intend to enjoy everything else that life has to offer. I will find happiness where I can, and I will continue to experience love and fellowship and community. I will revel in my friendships and the joys of interpersonal connection. It won’t be romantic connection, though. And the sooner you all come to terms with that (for me, not for you), the happier we will all be.

Love you. Platonically.

Matt

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That title (as is the case with so many of my titles) is taken from a song of the same name by Carsie Blanton and The Burning Hell. If you haven’t heard the song, it’s a satirical exploration of so many of the ways that everything in this country and the world are most definitely not great, not fine, and how they actually seem to be worsening in a lot of ways.

I don’t think I would say that my difficulties with this grief process are worsening, so that’s good. It’s also true, however, that everything is neither great nor fine.

When I tell someone that, they tend to immediately agree with me, and say something like, “Well of course you’re not doing okay, you’re going through something pretty terrible”. Which is true, and which I appreciate. I hate when I make someone feel bad for me because I was honest and transparent about my tough times. I also hate when someone second-guesses themselves immediately after asking how I’m doing, and then says something like, “I’m so stupid for asking that, of course you’re doing awful”. I don’t aspire to make anyone else feel sad—there’s enough sadness in my life right now to spare, and it serves no purpose for you to kick yourself for not being perfect in your responses. But honestly, it’s going to happen sometimes. If you’re in a relationship with me, you’re going to feel sad in the course of one of our conversations, sometimes. I just ask that you accept that reality and not distance yourself from me because it’s hard to experience sadness, even second-hand.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what I need from people. Maybe this feels ego-driven to you, but hear me out. I’m not usually in the practice of asking for what I need from other people (besides Kellie). Since she’s gone, and since I’m in this place of dramatically-reduced capacity, I honestly do need some things from other people that I can’t provide for myself. That’s really hard for me to come to terms with—not only because I like to just do things for myself but because I don’t like to impose on other. Maybe I don’t like to impose on others because I care about people, and maybe I don’t like to impose on others because I don’t feel worthy of their effort and energy. It’s probably a combination of both of those. I’ve spoken before about my relationship imposter syndrome, and this is probably related. Since I think I’m probably not that great a friend, especially now, I don’t know why other people would want to be in a relationship with me. I’m also never certain that I deserve to have people drop everything to prioritize me and my needs.

That’s never been more true than right now at this place in my life. I’m a member of a shitty club that nobody wants (or chooses) to be in. I’m a widower, and I’ll always be a widower. Putting aside the fact that I have zero interest in any partners besides Kellie, even if I remarried ten more times that would not make me cease to be a widower. I have brown eyes, I love lasagna, and I’m a widower. All immutable characteristics. I’ve had brown eyes and loved lasagna for many decades, but the widower thing is brand-new to me, so I’m still just barely starting down this path.

So what do I need from people? Right now, I guess I need to be seen. I know, you would love it if I could give you an easy and straightforward answer, like “send me a pizza and I'll be great”. The reason I keep trying to figure out what I need is because even now, I get asked by multiple people each day what they can do to help. I appreciate the question more than you know! It shows that you care! And also, I’m then placed in a situation where I have to give you an answer—and I have no clue how to respond when you ask.

You know when you tell someone “call me if I can ever help with anything” but don’t really expect them to ever call? You don’t say that because you would like them to not ask for help, you say it because you love them but don’t know what to offer. And when someone has said that to you, what have you asked for? Probably nothing. So it’s this unspoken social contract where you offer and the recipient nods and doesn’t follow up, and everyone is (in theory) happier.

But I DO need help with stuff. I just don’t usually know how to articulate that need. Two nights ago, I was so sad and so lonely and didn’t know what to do about it. I didn’t tell anyone in the moment because it was like midnight and I didn’t want to bug people. Would it have been great if someone had randomly said hi? Sure, of course. Was it my own fault for not just reaching out to people who have specifically instructed me to text them anytime? Yep. I didn’t want to bother anyone, so I just sat in those emotions and suffered a little more than I had to. If I could have articulated that need at 9pm, or even 11pm, I wouldn’t have experienced as much of the loneliness at midnight.

Part of the issue there is that I can’t always predict how I’ll feel an hour from now. Triggers abound, and they pop up out of nowhere like one of the birds in Duck Hunt, flapping across my consciousness, often followed by the thought “She’s gone, and your life will always be this hard. It will never get better than right now”. Of course it’ll get better—I know that logically. It’ll probably get better in fifteen minutes, even. But in the moment, it can be hard to shake.

Another part of the issue is that I’m just so tired. This is a recurrent theme in a lot of the widow/er communities online: the exhaustion is a really tough part of it. My therapist and I spoke about this today. I really think that it’s partly due to my brain trying to insulate me from my pain by distancing me from reality (including decreasing my level of alertness, resulting in the exhaustion). Part of it is also just an immediate result of all these emotions floating around my brain ALL. THE. TIME. I don’t think we’re built to carry so many emotions, and they wear a guy out. It’s also partly because masking takes so much energy, and even around your most-loved friends and family you’re still often doing a certain level of masking. That’s just a result of not wanting to cry ALL. DAY. LONG.

Either way, I’m so tired, and so coming with an answer for you about what needs you can fulfill in the moment is a tall order. I’m trying really hard to be honest and genuine and vulnerable, which means telling you how I’m feeling, which means trying to figure out how I’m feeling in the first place.

So back to being seen. I think what I crave most, more than anything else, is for you to hold some space for me. To see me, to show me you care about me, and to be okay with however I’m able to respond to that. Maybe that looks like hanging out, maybe it looks like bringing me food, and maybe it just looks like texting or calling me and letting me talk to you for a minute about how that minute feels to me. Because most of you have a person. You know what I mean: that person who is your person. My person is now gone, and I’m not that person to anyone else. That’s a hard pill to swallow, and when I dwell too long on that fact I can sometimes really start to panic. I think that will get less terrifying in time. If I can be seen by you for even a few minutes of my day, it feels less like I’m just alone in the world.

I have been one half of “Matt & Kellie” for thirty years. I know I keep saying that, but it’s the truth. It’s my email account, it’s my profile name across multiple websites, and it’s something that I’m reminded of countless times each day. Of course we each had our own identity, but we both always preferred being half of that puzzle and celebrating how perfectly we fit together. I don’t know how to do a whole lot of things on my own, but one of those things I don’t know how to do is to just be Matt all the time, instead of one half of Matt & Kellie.

Thank you for giving me grace as I keep trying to figure this out. Thank you for seeing me. And thank you for asking how I’m doing, even though the answer will probably make both of us sad. I’m trying my best to make Kellie proud and to be as healthy as I can as I keep moving down this road.

This afternoon marked six weeks since she died, and it does not feel any less devastating to me than it did six weeks ago. I look back at my journal and the things I wrote back then are still the same things I’m feeling today. I know I’ve been on a six-week journey, but it’s awfully difficult for me to judge a difference between where I am now and where I was back in April. It has turned from April to May, and now from May to June. And I’m still spending more of my day in tears than I would like. I’m still rolling over in bed every night trying to put an arm around someone who isn’t there. I’m still always half-expecting her to walk around the corner and say “Hey” like none of this happened. I don’t know how to “move on”, I don’t want to “move on”, and I don’t need advice on how to “move on”. (In case you were wondering.)

I’m going tomorrow night to test drive a new car. I facilitated a supervision training today that felt a lot better than the one I did last week. I keep growing and learning things and moving forward in my life. I would just rather do all of that stuff with Kellie than without her, even though that’s not an option.

Thank you for being along for the ride.

Now I’m going to go try (and probably fail) to read a book.

XOXO,

Matt

I hate death. It’s not a natural process, it’s not calm and peaceful and easy and something we all have to come to terms with. We all die sometime, but I still hate it. Yes, we are all technically slowly rotting all the time, but that doesn’t mean we need to accept the inevitability of death. Death is mean. It’s too often violent and harsh and damages everyone in its vicinity. Death sucks.

I’ve always felt that way, and so did Kellie. We both resolved to prolong our lives, when the time came, by any means necessary. Anything that would give us just another minute together. That was the plan.

But death is an asshole. And we didn’t get to turn our plan into action. Kellie died in seconds, maybe even one second. Neither of us could do anything to change that or stop it from happening. We didn’t get that extra minute. No chance to hold each other and say we loved what we had together. No opportunity for one last kiss. Not even a smile—she was facing away from me, and wouldn’t have seen my face any more than I could see hers.

Death is an asshole.

I was talking to someone this morning, and she called herself an asshole because our conversation made me cry in public. So I needed to let her know what I’m telling you all tonight: she’s not the asshole, death is.

Two miracles happened yesterday. I was on my way to the post office to take my photos and send in my passport application. While driving past the mailbox, I hopped out to grab yesterday’s mail, and opened it gradually while I was driving.

One of the difficult financial decisions I had to make last month was what to do with Kellie’s retirement account. Usually, you face all kinds of penalties for withdrawing funds from your account before retirement age, as a disincentive for doing so. But that’s not the case if your spouse dies—the only penalties you incur are the state and federal taxes you’d have to pay at the end of the year anyway. I knew that Kellie and I still had some decent debts out there (the loan for Sage’s final surgery, Kellie’s private student loan, and a few credit cards). My thinking was that if I took this disbursement it would help me wipe out those loans and credit cards, while also making the transition to not having Kellie’s income a little less painful for a few months. I calculated the taxes I’d lose and the bills I could pay off, and turned in the forms a couple days before Kellie’s celebration of life.

But remember I told you two miracles happened? The first was that I received the check for the retirement account yesterday (it somehow only took a couple of weeks). It was also way higher than I had expected, since nobody would ever accuse me of being a math major. It was the largest amount of money I have ever held in my hands at one time, and was enough to take my breath away.

The second miracle was that I got a letter from Kellie’s student loan company letting me know that her debt has been forgiven due to her death, even though I was the co-signer. If you don’t believe that’s a miracle, let me tell you about this loan.

Private student loans are from banks, not the same process as your typical student loan. You only take those when you’ve hit your student loan limit, because you can NEVER get rid of them. Not in bankruptcy, not due to poverty, not for anything. Except, apparently, your death. Kellie had to get this loan, in December of 2006, because she had reached her undergraduate student loan limit and needed to pay for her last semester of school plus living expenses. The bank she had worked for for seven or eight years, scheduling classes around them, had said they would not alter her schedule to let her take what she needed to graduate. She had to quit that job in the hopes of something better post-graduation. So we borrowed $14,500.

And how much, dear reader, do you think we still owed at the time of her death? After having paid almost $200 per month from mid-2007 until now? Yes, that’s nineteen years, or 228 months. By my math, we have repaid the bank more than $42,000. And we still owed them $11,100. Yes, they had decreased her principal by $3,400 and profited around $38,600. That’s evil. You think death is an asshole? So are private student loans, honestly.

But just like that, they’re gone. That made me cry, too. I mean, the bar is kind of low these days, but it did.

I got the passport photo taken in a daze and then went to my bank and waited in line, only to be told that I should really come back first thing today for a meeting with their banker so that I could open up a savings account and get a few percentage points of annual return for a check that big.

So I brought the check home, made my parents both hold it (so they could also experience what it was like to have that much in their hands at one time) and then was very very sure not to lose it or get robbed overnight. I deposited it into my new account this morning, and that was a real series of weights lifted off my mind, believe me.

Miracles, am I right? I don’t think that you necessarily have to believe in a God to believe in miracles, but since I believe in both it’s probably easier for me to ascribe divine intervention to the outcome.

There’s no doubt that the money will help me a great deal. There’s also no doubt that no check, of any size, is ever worth losing Kellie. It feels devastatingly unfair that the thing which gives us the ability to get rid of that evil student loan is her not being here anymore. The trade-off isn’t even close. I would take every debt I’ve ever incurred on this planet, multiply it by itself, add another twenty billion dollars or so, and double that if it meant one last minute to hold Kellie’s hand, tell her I love her, and see the smile creep across her face like waves hissing up a beach, higher and higher, making everything new and fresh and okay again.

Since that cannot happen (because, as I have noted, death is an asshole), I’ll take this savings account. I’ll pay the debts. I’ll use the rest in a way that I think would please Kellie. And I’ll stay here without her as long as I have to.

Honestly, I don’t know what else to do. Am I doing great at grief? I don’t know. Am I sucking terribly at it? No idea. I just keep waking up, far too early, and facing each new thing the day brings. Sometimes I’m happy, sometimes I’m devastated (I cried so hard this morning that it made me throw up for a bit), but I never feel okay about her being gone.

I never knew how hard this was going to be, but I wouldn’t have believed myself if I went back in a time machine anyway. This is way more difficult than I anticipated, even in those devastating early moments after she died when I kept repeating “What do you mean you can’t do anything” to the paramedic who gave me the news. When I allow myself to realize that she’s not gone for now, she’s gone for good, I still have panic attacks that make me completely lose it.

I’m still here. She isn’t. And the wrongness of that takes my breath away many, many times per day.

Miracles do happen, and yes, everybody say it with me: death is an asshole.

Hug your people tight tonight.

Matt

It was also really hard—I had the energy to do some sorting in my office, and that meant looking at things Kellie had bought and cared about and lovingly selected, which is such a difficult process for me now. Kellie was the very best gift-giver. She prided herself on listening when people talked, which meant learning their likes and dislikes, remembering what mattered to them, and then making exhaustive lists of what we were going to buy everyone for birthdays and holidays and just because. I cannot tell you how many half-finished birthday lists I’ve found for everyone in our life. It gave her so much joy to get it just right for someone, to see the smile on their face when they opened a present from her and felt seen and loved. That was her favorite.

I’m going to miss that. Not getting gifts from her (though they were always perfect, and birthdays and Christmases and Father’s Days are going to be much sadder now), but seeing her face light up when she bought me the perfect gifts, over and over, across all these decades. She never got bored of giving me presents, and I never got bored of loving her.

I think that love languages have some validity as a construct, and also have some nonsense thrown in as a little treat, as many self-help frameworks do. But Kellie’s love language was gift-giving, and mine is acts of service. I have sat on a bench at the foot of our bed and rubbed her legs and feet while we read together before bedtime every night for more than twenty years, and probably closer to thirty. You can ask my parents—foot massages was something we got in trouble for the first time she came to Kentucky to meet my family in person, as we were children and it was far too much physical intimacy for my parents to be comfortable with.

Can you imagine how it feels for me to not do that at bedtime, suddenly, without warning, after all those nights in a row? It feels deeply, terribly, horribly wrong. I can count on one hand the number of nights I didn’t do it in at least the last five years, maybe we were arguing or maybe she was staying overnight in a hospital. My point is that this is one example of an incredibly ingrained life routine, and we had hundreds (or even thousands). This change does not just affect me because I love her and miss her—it affects me because every minute of my day is now drastically different.

I got my passport photo taken today, and sent in the application afterward. One thing that’s different now than seventeen years ago (the last time I got my passport renewed) is that the light reflected off my bald head so badly he had to turn the lights off and on several times and take three different sets of pictures to get one he was happy with. That’s aging for ya, baby!

I also mailed in Coco’s AKC registration papers, since it’s something Kellie and I wanted to do for fun, just to certify that she is OFFICIALLY a fancy girl.

Just a short post for tonight. Not because I’m sad, because it’s not that bad at the moment. I just feel wiped out and need to go and get some rest.

Thanks for being there, and thanks for caring.

Matt

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It feels like some of the time I’ve gotten to spend with friends this month has given me a whole different kind of gift. Don’t hear me saying that everyone who has been here while I cried and has hugged me and offered real support on my worst days hasn’t been useful to my process. That’s been super valuable as well. But I have found that the interactions that I’ve come away from over the past week or so that have made me happiest have been the ones where it felt like we were just friends hanging out. The topic of Kellie has come up, of course, but she hasn’t been the primary focus.

In those interactions, it feels like maybe she’s just out of the room for a few minutes and might be back at some point. I’m starting to think that I need my friends to be my friends in addition to being shoulders to cry on. That signals to me that I’m entering a new phase of whatever this process is—some weird in-between phase where I am incredibly sad and also want to talk about a TV show or something.

I apologize if I navigate this transition weirdly or awkwardly with you, folks. I’m not moving on from my grief, and I’m not trying to ask anyone to pretend I’m not a widower who is having a really hard time just existing in the world. It’s just that I’m also a person in addition to being a widower, and so talking about whatever random thing is going to benefit my brain and heart as well.

I did some cleaning and organizing in my bedroom this afternoon, which was such a hard thing. It’s always been hard for me to work in there, since it happened, but I have come to accept the fact that it is so incredibly draining to do so that I’m going to have to just take it in one-hour chunks, not think about the tasks that need to be done. Maybe there’s something about the fact that our bedrooms are such an intimate part of who we are—we spend so much time there, and it’s where we’re most free to let down our guard.

Anyway, I can’t pick up stuff in there without smelling Kellie, or remembering Kellie, or missing Kellie so bad that my heart aches and aches. It is a whole new kind of exhaustion

Even though there are so many things that have gotten accomplished, there are still so many to go. It’s easy for me to get easily overwhelmed when I consider just how much I have to do without her (eventually, everything). When I run low on some kind of soap, I can’t assume she’s already got it in her cart—I have to buy it myself, now. When the water company gets mad because I haven’t paid, I can’t ask her to get online and do it while I’m getting another task done. (Well, I can’t pay the water bill at ALL, honestly, because they won’t let me into the account since I’m not Kellie. But that’s a whole other issue.)

When you have a partner, especially one you trust, there’s such a lovely division of labor that goes on. The parts of that machine snap together in a way that’s truly beautiful, when it works, and it amplifies your ability to get things done in a way that I hadn’t really thought deeply about in a very long time. You might think that you’re doing more of the household tasks than your partner, but you’re probably minimizing all kinds of things that they do do. But me? I literally have to do them all—or I will have to do them all when my parents leave. That’s pretty scary.

When I stop to consider the enormity of this loss, I need to take a step away mentally and emotionally and get a little distance from those feelings, because they are very big and very bleak.

Other than the bleakness, I had plenty of okay times in my day. Sure, the awful times sort of overshadowed the okay ones. But the okay ones existed as well, I just have to spend some energy consciously dwelling on them when things get particularly bad.

I’ve been wishing and wishing I could just have one last conversation with Kellie. I know that’s normal, and I know that’s not possible, and it doesn’t stop me from wishing for it to happen. Last night, I heard Kellie’s voice calling me at one point. It was clear and audible and very real, or at least it felt that way. As I told someone later on, I don’t know whether I imagined it or not. I don’t know if it was her or not. I don’t know anything except the fact that it gave me a moment of peace. I didn’t feel sad, not really, just wistful and like the completely wrong pieces of the puzzle that are my life snapped back into place again, just for a minute or two, just long enough to give me some respite. It was also a rare gift, whether I imagined it or not. I’m grateful for the way I felt, just for that moment.

Every time someone says I’m doing this so well, I’m overcome with doubt. I don’t know how I keep getting up and mostly doing stuff. I don’t have a plan, I’m not trying to do anything specific, and although I hope Kellie’s proud of me, I just don’t know if that’s true. The tears still come either way, and I still have to live with this whether I’m the best griever ever or the worst one.

I can’t say I’m ready to start the week. I hope you are, but I don’t have a lot to look forward to right now.

I wish she was here.

Matt

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That might seem odd to you if you’ve been following along on this journey and think that my life sounds pretty darn restful at the moment. Maybe that’s just the dregs of capitalism seeping into my brain waves, in the sense that most of us feel the need to be productive much of the time. If we aren’t, we must be lacking in some way, right?

I was really impacted by Tricia Hersey’s book Rest is Resistance a while back (I read it in one day, but that was back when I could still read). Her basic point is that rest—for its own sake, without any preconditions or parameters, just to rest—is something that we deserve. She says that we deserve rest because we are human beings, not because of something we’ve done that has made us worthy of that rest. She also says that our ancestors did not work themselves to death so that we can do the same thing. I agree with her so, so much that the grind mindset is toxic and that we need to prioritize just being at rest, rather than conceptualizing self-care as “I need to do what I can to rest today so that I can burn myself out tomorrow all over again”. I also wholeheartedly agree that we cannot make to-do lists while we’re resting, because that’s not rest.

The idea of rest as a radical act of resistance against capitalism really appeals to me, and so I’ve tried to think of periods of rest for myself in that context for the past couple of years. But it’s so hard to do that, isn’t it? I know, on the one hand, that I have at least a hundred small tasks I could be doing right now. If I did them, I’d probably do them poorly, though (since I’m so tired from everything else that has happened in my week). That doesn’t mean the tasks are my ultimate destination or priority, and that I’m just biding my time while resting until I get to do those things.

That fact helps me motivate myself to let myself just rest, sometimes. On a good day.

So when I say that it carried its own type of stress today, I mean that I know there are tasks I could pick up and do at any given moment, but I am consciously choosing not to do them today. So I have tried (unsuccessfully) to read. I have eaten food (including a delicious lunch from Evie’s Luau). I have played Mina the Hollower, a new game I’ve been waiting for for quite a while. I have listened to music. I have sat in Kellie’s recliner and thought about how big a hole her absence has left in my daily existence. I have taken the dogs to the backyard, and I have chatted with my parents off and on. That’s been my day. Quiet, peaceful, and full of rest.

I did get the chance to speak with a friend from my Quaker Meeting this morning—it was such a pleasant surprise to hear from her and talk about how I’m doing. I don’t know about you, but my immediate impulse when I get a phone call is to do anything BUT answer it. I have been trying to lean in the opposite direction since Kellie died, because I’ve been getting so many random calls that have turned out to be lovely. And this one was more than lovely, it provided me with a lot of support that I didn’t know I was even looking for today. Serendipity strikes again!

In other news, I was number 19,939 today for the general sale of the Power to the People Festival, unfortunately. Much more fortunately, one of my friends was number 531 (somehow) and he was able to snag me a ticket. So I’m headed to the DC area in October with him, and I cannot wait. Public Enemy just got added to the lineup yesterday—it should be a truly epic show, and the fact that more than a hundred thousand of us immediately tried ordering tickets within the last couple of days should give us all hope about the ways that our fellow Americans feel about the direction this country is headed. Needless to say, it’s sold out. That doesn’t mean there aren’t scalpers already selling tickets for TEN TIMES their face value, for literally thousands of dollars. Ouch.

I’ve started to look around for widower support groups that might appeal to me in some way. I have found that many widowers are in their 70s and 80s and are thus not necessarily in the same boat as I am (though it’s the same ocean for sure). Who knows if I’ll be able to find something, but I’ve got a lifetime to look, right?

I’ve also been looking for a way to buy some William Baffin roses (the suggestion of which was another gift from my friend). If anyone has seen them mentioned anywhere, please let me know. I think they’d be the perfect addition to Kellie’s garden. I found one nursery that had them in stock, but I’d have to pick them up in Colorado in-person, and although I’m considering road trips that might be slightly too far to go for a rose bush.

These late nights sitting on the bench out there have given me some peace, at least some momentary peace. Our neighborhood is so quiet, and at night the view is so pretty. My initial reaction to my dad’s suggestion of a memorial garden in the front yard was surprise at the idea that anyone would want to hang out in my front yard rather than the backyard, which is considerably more private. But I have to say that the garden has been the perfect place to sit and remember Kellie and talk through some struggles I’m having. I highly recommend hanging out in my front yard, in other words. Not surprisingly, my dad turned out to be right once again.

I continue writing to Kellie in a dedicated journal every day as well as writing here and also pondering a longer-form writing project of some sort. The words seem to be helping me stay unstuck emotionally far better than keeping them in would, so I’m grateful that I started doing this. As I’ve said, I plan to keep doing it as long as it feels worthwhile—to me, to you guys, to my process, to something.

Someone who read my post last night asked how they can buy me audiobooks on Audible. Mind you, I am not asking for presents. But if you wanted to do that, it appears that you can go to Audible, click “more options” on the page for a given book, and choose “give as gift” to send it to anybody. The email address I use most often is apooltoswim@gmail.com. Also, there are alternatives not owned by Jeff Bezos (such as Libro.fm and Chirp). Again, I don’t need audiobooks from you, but I wanted to answer the question.

Another response I wanted to comment on was from someone who noted that death certificates are often just a formality and don’t really reflect the true cause of death or aren’t typically accurate in all kinds of ways. I can accept that that’s true in practice, but it SHOULDN’T be the way it happens. It matters what we say about how a person died. It should be accurate, and it shouldn’t be a random guess. That’s what I’m saying. I’m not trying to say that my experience with Kellie is worse than the typical person experiences, I’m just trying to ask why we can’t aspire to better than “I guess I’ll just put something random” on these very important documents. Folks who are grieving are going to ascribe more meaning to something like a death certificate than the general population does, because it’s the last concrete thing we have that symbolizes the dividing line between them being alive and them being dead.

I’d like to resume my discussion of the 55 important songs I chose for Kellie’s calling hours playlist, before too much time goes by and I forget to pick up that thread for too long.

1. OK Go: This Too Shall Pass

   This one was important to both Kellie and I. The video is (of course, if you know OK Go) pretty awesome, but the song gives me hope and the kind of spine tingling feelings that I appreciate from a really stellar piece of music.

2. Tori Amos: Silent All These Years

   Kellie loved Tori Amos for a big portion of her life, especially the album this one is on. Probably Tori’s most recognizable song, and I always appreciate hearing it.

3. Geoff Berner: Light Enough to Travel

   This one is special. Geoff Berner is one of our favorite artists ever, and he is also someone who has personally blocked me on Facebook because we were arguing about something dumb. Politically-speaking, I am far more a humanist and an optimist and a person who believes in the power of advocacy and organizing, and Geoff is far more a person who wants to bring about positive change via revolution in the streets. His music has been a consistent part of the last twenty years of our lives, and this one is our favorite.

4. Old Man Luedecke: I Quit My Job

   Did you ever have a song that you listened to incessantly during a hard time in your life, that you genuinely believe helped you make it through? This is that song for Kellie. In spite of all the things we never managed to do in our mere 30 years together, the one thing I am proudest of her for actually doing is quitting her job.

   Oh bright minds of poverty

   Hold on to your heart won liberties

   And discard your store-bought realities

   Don’t let them take the joy that you make

   On your own

   Work when you need to maybe

   Don’t let ‘em bleed you baby

   They do nothing more than feed you lady

   Don’t let them take the joy that you make

   On your own

   Don’t fuss, don’t fight it no

   Take that wrong and right it ho

   Can always live on rice and potatoes

   Take your heart’s candle and relight it

   I quit my job

   I’m free today

   Should be proud of where I am

   All my friends work their dreams with their hands

   And truly this is the promised land

   Don’t kill yourself about making it

   Just be takin it easy but be takin it

   There’s enough out there who are fakin it

   Don’t let them take the joy that you make

   On your own

5. The Shins: New Slang

   This one is very evocative of a specific place and time for us, and will always take us back there.

6. Brian Vander Ark: Colorful

   You may know this guy as the lead singer of the Verve Pipe (or maybe not). He’s very very tall, he’s an incredible singer songwriter, and he is worth traveling to see live. We’ve done so more than a few times. This song always makes me think of Kellie, and it’s a great one. These lyrics are superb, and are actually making me cry right now typing them out.

   The show is over, close the storybook
   There will be no encore
   And all the random hands that I have shook
   Well, they’re reaching for the door
   I watch the backs as they leave single-file
   You stood stubborn, cheering all the while

   I know I can be colorful
   I know I can be grey
   And I know this loser’s living fortunate
   ‘Cause I know you will love me either way

   Most were being good for goodness sake
   But you wouldn’t pantomine
   You are more beautiful when you awake
   Than most are in a lifetime
   Through the haze that is my memory
   You stayed for drama though you paid for a comedy

7. Marty Casey: Mr. Brightside

   You’ve probably heard Mr. Brightside by The Killers at some point, or many points. But you probably have never heard this version. Rockstar: INXS was a reality show most people didn’t watch, which was a competition to replace Michael Hutchence as lead singer of INXS. We got a lot of joy from the performances on that show, and this was her favorite.

8. Hugh Christopher Brown & Kate Fenner: While You Sleep

   I’ve shared lyrics from this song here in the past, but haven’t really discussed why it’s mattered so much to Kellie and I. Chris & Kate have been writing and recording as a duo (sometimes) since they were teenagers, and the weaving of their voices together is just the absolute best. Lots of you probably know that due to a series of unfortunate events, Kellie didn’t get her driver’s license as a kid. She was actually in her 30s by the time that happened. But we’ve been on a bunch of road trips over the years, which meant I have driven Kellie to a bunch of places over the years, often during the nighttime hours while she dozed and I kept us (mostly) safe and got us where we were going. This song describes that mood perfectly for me, and has always been special to us both for that reason.

   Shadows play on the snow

   Gently moonlight casts its glow

   Close your eyes, stars appear

   When you wake, we will be far from here

   There’s a promise left to keep

   I will drive, while you sleep

9. Matt Nathanson: Loud

   Kellie and I have hundreds of Matt Nathanson songs in every music library or app, but this is her favorite song by him. It never fails to make me feel close to her. It helps that it’s a duet between a man and woman, so we always had our own parts to sing (like our marriage, now that I think about it).

10. Harry Connick Jr.: It Had To Be You

    This is the only song on the playlist that I asked for advice on. Kellie had a deep, deep love for Harry Connick Jr. throughout high school. He was very important to her, but not so much to me. I reached out to Kellie’s dear friend Lindsay for a Harry Connick Jr. suggestion, and she pondered and gave me several options. I ended up choosing this one out of Lindsay’s picks because it’s from When Harry Met Sally, which Kellie really enjoyed and regularly rewatched.

11. Martin Tielli: My Sweet Relief

    Martin is one of those once in a generation talents that you keep track of whenever he appears, because you don’t want to miss the art and music and beauty he creates in the world. He’s a treasure, and we have always loved his work. My Sweet Relief from his first solo album is a really special example of that. It gave Kellie and I all the feelings. If you haven’t heard it, you should.

I hope that you had a restful day full of peace, joy, love and all the delicious snacks you wanted. You deserve it, bud.

Take care,

Matt

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