Still Walking This Lonely Road

Yeah, I didn’t post anything yesterday. I’m okay with that—I think it’s probably healthier for me to not pressure myself into putting something out there in a given day just to do it for all of you, especially if I wasn’t feeling like it.

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