Told You I'll Be Here Forever
Today had its ups and its downs (as is usually the case). I woke up at 6:30 and drove to Conneaut for fresh bagels. On the way, I opted for a nice long walk down at the beach.
The walk gave me plenty of time to look at the beautiful lake, cry until I threw up a little, and have a nice conversation with Kellie. Good times.
All of these things also happened during my walk:
Someone I know saw me, stopped, offered their condolences about Kellie’s death, and invited me to attend their grief support group.
I witnessed a squirrel running around on the beach for the first time in my life.
I hadn’t noticed the whole “locks on the bridge” in Conneaut before, and thought that was cool.
That’s a great boardwalk!
Later on, I got some cleaning done in my office, worked on grading, updated some powerpoint slides, and pondered my mortality. All of that took a couple of hours, so then I took a nap for a bit.
I know, I know, my life is pretty fascinating.
I really appreciated the folks who checked on me today. Every time I started to get lonely, someone new was saying hi. That pretty much kept me going, and I can’t tell you how grateful I was for those check-ins.
I spent some time talking with my therapist about how I’ll know (or how my parents will know, or how anybody will know) when I’m ready for them to leave Ashtabula. And I’m still really up in the air about it. How can I tell whether I’m pretty okay to be alone with the dogs until I’m alone with the dogs? If anyone has any ideas about milestones or benchmarks, I’m glad to hear them out.
Right now, here’s how most of my time goes:
I’m with another person, and feel like I’d really rather be by myself.
I leave, or they leave, and I’m by myself.
I feel sad because I’m by myself.
So I reach out to another person.
Etc.
To recap, across the past 48 years I have developed the following three favorite things: reading, being by myself, and Kellie. The past five weeks have left me unable to read, no longer finding any joy in aloneness, and without Kellie. So, in other words, not an optimal situation for my self-care routine.
Luckily, I teach workshops on self-care, so I must be a pretty big expert in taking care of myself, right? Unfortunately, I have been unable to find the motivation to develop new self-care strategies either, which has led to me pretty much just having a bad time most of the time.
One of my other big challenges is just how long we’re talking about, here, when it comes to being without Kellie. Putting aside the question of whether she’s still out there, somewhere, for us to find one another sometime (I have a pretty firm opinion on that one), how am I supposed to live for literally years and years without her here with me? I don’t want to be gone myself, but I sure don’t know how I can make it months and years and perhaps even decades without her. It’s not that I want to die, I just don’t know how I can live. That’s what I’m trying to figure out.
A pretty fundamental part of being alive is finding joy and satisfaction and happiness in that life, right? I can’t imagine having those things stripped away from my life long-term, as they are now, and me still wanting to hang on. I get happy all the time, for a little while. It just doesn’t stick.
And as I was saying to my therapist today, time continues to be so strange. Time blindness is something that I experience all the time, when I get hyperfixated on something and lose track of how much time it took me. But this strange opposite of time blindness is a tough thing. Everything only takes a tiny amount of time now, so I wake up and there are MANY hours until lunch, then MANY hours until supper, then MANY hours until bedtime. Nothing takes a normal amount of time, and I get bored of everything very very quickly.
I’m definitely not in shock, and I’m not in denial of the situation I’m facing. It just doesn’t feel good. I keep trying to figure out how to make this work, and it’s not something I can reason through. At least not something I can reason through yet.
I made my parents watch Tom Hiddleston doing Rihanna’s Umbrella lip sync battle tonight—that’s the extent of the exciting times happening in this household.
I know I keep telling lots of you this when we talk. But all of this is weird. Every bit of it. I keep getting shocked by new aspects of grief that keep arriving without any advance warning, and it’s thoroughly disorienting.
Okay, that’s probably enough for this evening. I hope you have a good night’s sleep, and that you don’t have to deal with this shit yourself anytime soon. Because it sucks.
Take care,
Matt
Navigating the unknown is so very hard. Feeling so lost is hard. Being unsettled and off balance is hard. What you are sharing…this has to be so hard. But know your tribe cares immensely.