There Will Always Be Someone Better Than You

Even if you're the best.

I was relatively busy today. I had held steadfast to my promise not to check my university email over the past two days, since I was using vacation time and that means not working (I know this seems obvious, but it’s not an easy thing for me to do). We got up early this morning because Ivy’s stomach has been upset for the past couple of nights, since we switched dog food, so she needed to get up every few hours. At 6-something, I gave up and we started our day.

That meant I was able to be incredibly productive from 6-9am and have dealt with all kinds of work crises before the time when I would have been starting thinking about breakfast in my past life. And let me tell you, it’s a real dopamine rush to open that mailbox full of 70-something emails and start solving problems.

There are so many little things—things that have been a huge difference in my life (even for the better) since Kellie died, which I would never have considered changing before April.

I often find myself pondering change, these days. I don’t know if I have anything profound to note about that topic today that I haven’t already said in prior installments of this newsletter, but I’m telling you anyway, because it’s been on my mind.

I’m fascinated by the fact that the widower subreddit has had a couple of discussions this week about how difficult it is for people who lose their partner to read after that loss. Someone there is working on getting a book club up and running, since it seems to be such a hugely widespread issue. It’s something that I had never encountered before this, in all my years of working with grief and loss, but that has been one of the hardest changes in my life to try and deal with.

Okay, scratch that statement a minute ago. It looks like I’m going to talk about change after all. If you’re in my situation, you go where the wind takes you sometimes. Here we go. Let’s quantify some of these changes, for posterity’s sake. Four months into this phase of my life, here are some of the big ones.

Bad Life Changes Since Kellie Died:

• I no longer have access to my soulmate, who was incredible and beautiful and made my life better in basically every single way possible for the past thirty years.

• I cry very frequently, at unpredictable intervals, with no ability to shut that off until it’s ready to be over on its own.

• Every single routine in my entire life has been changed.

• My energy levels are dramatically reduced.

• Ditto with my ability to sustain focus.

• I’ve lost the ability to get a huge amount of pleasure from all kinds of hobbies, especially reading.

• Cooking for myself has been really hard for me to be very passionate about.

• I feel really isolated and cut off from people, way more often than I would like.

• It feels like every day takes an enormous number of hours to get through—the passage of time has slowed to an absolute crawl.

• I have to make decisions on my own without Kellie’s input or perspectives.

• Remembering to buy groceries or eat food or drink water or pay the mortgage or take my medication, etc. has become incredibly challenging.

• I’ve had a very large decrease in income.

• I don’t have anyone to remind me to eat meals or care for my meat suit in all kinds of other ways.

• I have to go to doctor’s appointments alone for the first time in my whole life.

• I had something on the shoulder of my shirt all day and nobody let me know until I noticed it in a mirror myself.

• I’m worried about major holidays, but especially Christmas.

• I’m concerned about aging and dying alone.

• In general, I have a lot more anxiety about a lot of things than I did back then.

• I had to figure out how to cut my own toenails the other day, because Kellie just always did it for me.

• There’s nobody to buy me little surprise presents that are the perfect thing I didn’t even know I wanted.

• Nobody can tell me what my shirt or pants size are and where or how to buy more (I plan to only wear my existing clothes for the rest of my life).

• There is literally nobody to blame it on when I’m late to something.

• Nobody shares one set of memories from the past thirty years with me.

• I no longer really dream in my sleep, which is completely new.

• I frequently run out of household staples like paper towels and laundry soap and stuff without her to keep track of and order them all.

• I experience a lot more sadness, and a lot less joy, in the course of my daily life.

• I’m vulnerable with basically everyone I know, basically all the time.

Good Life Changes Since Kellie Died:

• I’m now an early riser, and I have decided I love having all that extra time.

• I really enjoy the variety in foods that I have gotten to eat.

• I’m happy to be able to make decisions on my own without debate and negotiation.

• It’s significantly easier to do laundry for one person than two.

• I’m free to go where I want at any time, as long as I make sure the pups are okay.

• My friends have demonstrated their love, care, concern and connectedness to me in a million small and large ways.

• It’s wonderful to have found and integrated into my life three amazing professionals that I trust and respect who are glad to clean my house, babysit my dogs, and give me massages.

• I can listen to my favorite music, very loud, absolutely anytime I want.

• I found these little hands-free teeth flossers that are really fun to use.

• My dad made me switch to aluminum-free deodorant so I don’t get Alzheimer’s.

• I absolutely love my new car.

• The sidewalk to my front door and Kellie’s garden both make me really happy on a daily basis.

• My coffee orders are half as expensive as they used to be.

• I talk to my parents at least once a day, which hasn’t been the case since I was a child.

• My guest bedroom is spotless, and so are all kinds of other spaces in my house.

• Heck, my own bedroom hasn’t been this clean since we moved in eight years ago.

• I always know where all the remote controls are.

• When I find a new fidget toy that looks cool, I don’t have to buy two of them to make sure Kellie is happy too.

• Nobody tells me to stop playing with my new very loud fidget toy while they’re watching TV or talking on the phone.

• Against all odds, I have somehow cultivated a daily writing habit for the first time in my life. I write something for Substack, a private letter to Kellie, and also poetry or essays or whatever basically every day. That’s a lot of writing, and Kellie would be really proud of me for this one.

• I go to a Silent Book Club every month.

• I go on a lot more walks now.

• For that matter, I sit in nature a lot more, too.

• I spend a lot less time working.

• I officially became a member of our Quaker meeting.

• I’ve been to a lot more concerts lately.

• I’m vulnerable with basically everyone I know, basically all the time.

Okay, those are the two lists for now. It’ll be interesting for me to look back on these items, a year or five years or twenty years from now, and see what’s changed or what’s been added to each of these two sides of the coin of Kellie’s death.

I know that I’ve said before that I’m not going to get sucked into the trap of believing that a good thing in my life right now must be balanced with something equally bad related to my grief. And that I’m not going to convince myself that a good day right now means that a bad one is on the horizon.

Even though I just gave you 27 things that have gotten worse since I lost Kellie and 27 things that have gotten better since I lost Kellie, the good things are never going to be worth the cost. That doesn’t mean that they don’t all give me joy!

I am resolved to live my life, to be happy, and to not give up on the potential of experiencing hope and meaning for a really long time in the future. But I would cut off every one of my fingers and toes with a butter knife, right now, in exchange for getting thirty more seconds with Kellie (though she’d be pretty upset at the sight of all that blood, and would probably spend most of the time looking for band-aids to try and patch me up).

You don’t know how desperately I want her back with me. That doesn’t matter, ultimately, because there’s no force on earth that is going to make that happen (at least not while I’m still alive). I know that the bargaining is an easy trap to fall into as well, and I try not to do that for long. Because every one of those trains of thought just make me say that yes, I would sacrifice anything for her. So it’s not a very fun trolley problem sort of a mental exercise. It’s probably not great of me to mix trains and trolleys in a single thought experiment, too, but I never called myself a philosopher.

Get some rest. Tomorrow’s another day, whether we’re ready for it or not.

Matt