Joy, Gratitude and Other Elusive Critters

As should be clear to everyone by now, I fully intend to write through it. I have some options here—I could suffer in silence, I could dump everything on one or two people, or I could share the wealth. We’re coming up on the two-year anniversary of our beloved Sage’s death next week, and when that happened I spent quite a while sharing some thoughts about our grief journey.

The loss of Sage was the worst I’d ever hurt in my life. She was truly a member of our family, and I don’t know how I made it through two years of sorrow from losing her. But I had that experience with Kellie to back me up and listen to me and cry with me and distract me.

This—this is worse. Orders of magnitude worse. And that’s not because I’m suddenly able to realize that losing Sage wasn’t that big a deal after all, or because I have some newfound sense of perspective that dogs are just animals and don’t matter as much as I initially thought. No, this is worse because Kellie and I were connected at the soul, and I feel like we still are (no past-tense needed for that). But she’s behind that veil that separates where we are now from where we'll be eventually, and so I don’t feel her presence the way I always did before. Not in a woo-woo kind of a way, it’s just different than it was five days ago.

So today was the kind of a day where you start off optimistic because of everything you managed to accomplish and then end up slightly less optimistic because of how hard everything was (but still happy that you pulled off another day). I’ll bet the German language has a word to encapsulate that feeling, but sadly, I don’t know German. So instead you just get to read a paragraph about my complicated feelings.

I felt cared-for today. I had a great variety of conversations with folks who love Kellie and I, both via text message and in-person. I got to talk with someone who has been out of my life for a while, and that made me really happy. I got up early and took Coco and Ivy to the funeral home to pick up Kellie’s wedding rings, which was a very difficult thing for me. The dogs helped, and so did having a funeral director kind enough to bring everything out to the parking lot so I didn’t have to parade the dogs around before 9am in the morning. My new-ish neighbor visited with baked goods and kindness.

My dad has put a lot of energy into projects that will hopefully make my life easier to live when the new normal gets here. I’ve tried my best to make peace with someone else cleaning up my messes. We sure develop such a strange relationship to shame, don’t we? I know that absolutely nobody in my life cares that my fridge is a mess, or that the baseboards need to be dusted, or that there’s literally tea in my cupboards right now that expired in 2018.

And I’m having to come to terms with the fact that maybe it’s okay to have help with some of the stuff I just can’t get to? So if any of you know someone awesome who might be looking for another house to help tidy up a few times a month, can you let me know?

But I still feel bad about it existing in my orbit, as though anybody has the time and energy to fulfill all our obligations AND also manage all the other household things. I’ve had to try and compartmentalize off my anxiety about judgment from other people about our home, though, because I just have so little control over any of the things happening in my life right now. As someone told me this evening, this is a time for preserving the energy I’ve got, since I have a finite amount of it and so so many things that take from that stockpile. I feel deeply grateful to my dad for doing these projects, and deeply grateful to all of you for saying hi or even just letting me know you see me and care about what I’m going through (or, much more meaningfully, letting me know you care about Kellie and the incredibly important legacy she’s left in this community).

Please hear this: you don’t have to be the friend or other loved one who does (fill in the blank) in order to be important in my life. You can just be who you are and give what you’ve got (even if that’s just a moment of kindness via text or Facebook comment or beaming it to me via happy thoughts). I have no way to conclusively prove your happy thoughts don’t make a positive difference for me, so have at it. It can’t hurt, right?

I got about 10% of my work to close Kellie out of the private practice done today, which was good. Every little bit helps. I just have to keep telling myself that, on and on. And eventually it’ll be done.

I had the great privilege of picking up my sister from the airport at midnight tonight, which I was excited to get to do, and which also gave me a reason to be occupied during my aforementioned shitty most-hated 10-2 time slot. I love my sister, and she and I don’t get to see each other often enough. I’m thrilled that she came to offer tangible support in what has become a pretty awful time in my life, and I’m so grateful for the time and energy and expense it takes for all of these people to ignore their own responsibilities to care about me. It’s pretty embarrassing if I stop to think about it, so I try to limit the number of times I tell people ‘thank you so much’ to two or three per day. I don’t want to be a bother, and I’m bothering everybody right now.

I’ve been reflecting on all the busy-ness and chaos that sometimes surrounds Kellie and I and all our multiple roles and appointments and service to all kinds of folks. People have told us both for many years that they don’t understand how we do everything we do. A hard lesson I’ve been learning this week is that the thing that gives me the energy to do all that stuff is the time we get that’s full of quiet and joy and peace from being in our safe home, surrounded by the love Ivy and Coco and Kellie and I have for each other, being happy and walled-off from everything that could sap our strength and intrude on this perfect interlude before getting back to the innumerable demands on our time and energy. And that time is now gone, or so substantially changed that I don’t recognize it as even existing anymore. It sometimes worries me to think about how I’m going to manage to function without my cocoon for the rest of my life. I hope that changes into something new that gives me peace and hope and joy in the future, but I’m sure not there right now.

So anyway, that’s where I’m at. It was a good day, it was a draining day, and I stopped to reflect several times about just how tired I feel. If you’re wondering whether I appreciate what you’ve done or how you’ve shown me you care about Kellie and I, listen: it meant everything to me. Absolutely everything.

Time to try and sleep.

XOXO,

Matt