Good News for People Who Love Bad News

Last night was another rough one. I just couldn’t come up with things to keep me busy, and without things to keep me busy the time goes by incredibly, incredibly slowly. It’s almost incredible just how long one night can take me to get through.

So I end up being very productive with a lot of small tasks, and then when those are done I lack the creativity to come up with new tasks, so then I’m out of luck.

Last night, I washed all our dishes, gave Ivy a bath, used my new AirPods to give myself a hearing test, cooked a Costco cheese pizza, ate some of that, and then went outside to sit in Kellie’s garden for a bit. Do you know how much of my night was consumed by that list of tasks? One hour.

On a positive note, my AirPods say that my hearing is great.

I came in from the garden after I looked up to see Coco standing on the dining room table watching me through the window. When I stood up to take a photo, she knew she was busted and ran away, unfortunately. Otherwise I’d share it with y’all.

My sleep score went higher last night, and that was partly because—for the first time ever—Coco and Ivy curled up together and slept all night in the bed with me! Truly amazing. I don’t know if it’ll ever happen again, but I was so excited to witness it at least once.

I felt groggy all morning, and that wasn’t great. But I was able to get some work done, so I was able to push through whatever that was.

I spent some time on the deck with the dogs, which was lovely.

Jessie worked her magic in the house while I continued to marvel at just how incredible it is to have a cleaner who is absolutely brilliant. It probably freaks her out a little bit that I continually tell her how incredible she is, but I mean it, she really is. I will keep singing her praises because she is making a tangible difference in my life, and so people need to hear about that. It’s all part of my “be super honest and transparent” phase, right?

This afternoon was challenging. It was time for me to teach my first workshop again since I lost Kellie. I know I wasn’t on top of my game, and I was much less calm and much less smooth than I usually am in my delivery. It did not help that my computer insisted on processing several Windows updates at the exact time I was supposed to log on. It did help that I knew the material really well, since I’ve taught this particular training at least thirty times. But I wasn’t myself. That shouldn’t surprise me, as you all know I’m really not myself in any sense of the word. One example I can easily come up with for that is that my shirt was inside-out for about an hour and a half. Nobody but me seemed to have noticed?

My first doctoral-level class started this week. I made the decision to tell my class about Kellie in my introduction, because otherwise it would be far weirder at some future point when that fact comes out. I wouldn’t want to have to explain to anyone a year from now why I didn’t happen to mention it, and since I’ll be in a cohort with these people for three years it just felt easier to tell them up front.

That brings up an interesting point—the question of when, or if, to mention Kellie’s death to someone is such a strange one. It hadn’t previously occurred to me as a challenge, though maybe it should have. People I know well already know. People I don’t know well—or at all—get really uncomfortable at the news. But when someone asks about my wife and how she’s doing, or when there’s something like a getting-to-know-you activity in my class this week where I’m encouraged to talk about my partner…what am I supposed to say other than the truth? The very kind person who was my producer for today’s training didn’t know, for instance. The last time we had spoken was about a week before she died, when I had postponed the training until today so that I could be free to take Kellie to her pulmonology appointment the day after she died. So when I apologized for having cancelled that prior training, and the poor producer commented that it was okay to cancel so that I could take my wife to an appointment, how could I not let her know that the appointment never happened and that actually she died instead?

It’s all weird and it’s all awkward and none of it is easy or smooth or simple. I hate the fact that the responsibility for all that burden and difficulty falls on me, when I’m already kind of occupied being miserable a lot of the time. It’s not fair, but things aren’t feeling very “fair” in general these days, so what else is new?

I was looking for a power cord for Kellie’s old laptop this evening before supper, because I don’t need all these laptops and my dad desperately needs one that works better than his. The laptop is fine, but the charger is not, since Coco ate it a few weeks before Kellie’s death. I ordered a new one, but in all the chaos after she died I have completely lost the replacement. So I spent some time looking through a section of my office that I hadn’t touched since then. It’s been too much for me to go that far into this particular pile, but I managed it today.

“Managed it” is all relative, mind you. I was miserable, I cried more than is probably healthy, and I spent a long time just looking at my most recent Christmas card from her. She spoke about how 2026 was going to be a great year for us, about how being with me was so precious to her, and about how much she loved me. It honestly kind of made me unable to function for a few minutes. Like I’ve shared previously, the idea that there is so much time ahead of me, not just today or tomorrow but next year and the year after that and maybe twenty or thirty or even more years of missing her is not a great thing for me to ponder.

Christmas was always Kellie’s most precious and special of holidays. We have an ever-changing and ever-growing list of Christmas movies that it was absolutely imperative for us to get through each year. It’s up to 33 movies—I just double-checked, in the interest of honesty. The season was so special for Kellie because of the nostalgia, sure. But more than that, she loved the idea that people would get together and set aside old differences, eat good food, be cozy together, and just focus on loving each other. She wasn’t all about getting presents, either—she LOVED getting presents, but something you might know or might not know about Kellie is that she was the best gift-giver I have ever met. Her favorite thing, I’m pretty sure, was knowing the perfect thing to give you that would make you feel special and loved.

There was a time a few years ago when we had a friend who was going through a tough spot financially. Kellie was so happy to get her gifts and got so much joy from that experience, but it was awkward for our friend to get those gifts since she couldn’t reciprocate. The biggest gift Kellie could give that friend in that moment was to choose to stop buying her presents altogether. It hurt Kellie to do that (she always wanted to buy everyone presents) but it illustrates the point that Kellie’s main motivation was to give others what mattered to them, not what mattered to her. It was so shocking to me to see, over and over, Kellie make the most unselfish choices possible. She wasn’t motivated by doing things which would make herself happy like most people would be. Nope, she was all about other people. I think that really shone through with some of the memories folks shared about her in her celebration of life.

If Kellie leaves behind one thing, it is this: she always put herself second, and always put loving others before her own needs. There are good and bad things about that, of course. I know that she experienced heartache and pain she didn’t have to experience, because she kept on loving people even when relationships got complicated or became less of a priority for folks who were struggling with other things in their lives. That’s something she and I share. I seem to be categorically incapable of deciding to stop loving someone. Maybe that’s one of the reasons that we worked so well—I would never have chosen to stop being with her, and she would never have chosen to stop being with me. We both chose each other every day, multiple times a day. It’s not like we stayed together by default. We were meant to be together no matter what happened, though. The thing we couldn’t have predicted (or chose to avoid predicting) was the thing that happened. We’re separated now, by this whole death thing. I don’t think that we’ll be separated forever—I’ll find her again someday.

You can feel free to believe whatever you believe, and I probably won’t judge you for it (unless you choose to believe that people don’t have the absolute right to be themselves, which I will absolutely judge you for). But I know that our love is both more powerful and longer-lasting than our mortal bodies.

I’m going to do some homework. Say hi to me sometime—it’ll make me happy, and maybe that makes you feel good too, and that way you’re living our a little piece of Kellie’s legacy just as much as I am. That probably sounds selfish of me, but Kellie would approve of me trying to get you to reach out to me, so I don’t feel bad for saying it.

Here’s hoping for a better day tomorrow. Or at least more good moments and fewer rough patches.

See ya sometime,

Matt