You might be wondering why I’m still keeping track the way I do. You might think to yourself that I’m obsessing over how long it’s been, or that I’d be better-off if I were able to just stop noting the passage of time like this.
It doesn’t matter to me either way—I’m doing it how I need to do it, with your support or without (though primarily with, thankfully).
The fact remains that five months and one week ago, give or take a few hours, Kellie suddenly died. Sure, she was sick. Yes, we’d been struggling with some mystery symptoms for a few months that will never be explained or explainable. And absolutely, she had had trouble with her health for many years. But none of that made her death any less of a surprise. Not for me, not for her, and not for any of the dozens of friends and family members who continue to mourn her passing.
I count because it helps me to keep track of the passage of time, for starters. I’ve shared with you all the fact that time feels so strange to me since I lost Kellie. Things that used to feel like they lasted forever (like an incredibly boring meeting) pass instantly for me, these days. Things that used to feel like they were over far too quickly (like a peaceful evening at home) now seem to take decades of waiting until it’s late enough for me to go to bed. Everything changed for me when Kellie died, particularly when it comes to time, and if I keep myself situated chronologically by remembering how many weeks and months it’s been since that happened, it helps me keep track of what day it is and even what month or season it happens to be.
A piece of my time-tracking habit is about mindfulness, too. There are so many benefits to our mental health if we can live a bit more in the moment. If you spend much time thinking about it, that makes sense. Anxiety is often a side-effect of thinking too much about the future, and depression is often a side-effect of thinking too much about the past. Mindfulness helps us live in the now, helps us be grateful for what we have, and also helps us use a little intention in considering our place in the universe. It helps us to be a little bit more centered if we’re recognizing where we’re at right now. So knowing how many weeks it’s been in this new version of my life helps me be more mindful.
A third reason I care so much about how many weeks it’s been since I lost her is about my own lack of self-confidence. Maybe I’ll approach it thusly: I have a friend who has always looked much younger than her actual chronological age. She’s in a position of power and authority now, and has been for quite a few years. If you go back a decade or more, she was still in a position of authority, but was continually given less respect by those around her in professional settings, maybe largely because they assumed she was less competent than her peers because they always thought she was a kid. Her own level of competence and skill had nothing to do with how she was judged, but how she was viewed by others definitely made her doubt her own abilities.
When I think about my widowhood, the longer I am in this state, the more I feel I can speak to it with some degree of authority. As one example, in the weeks after Kellie died, I started letting those close to me know that I will never be in a romantic relationship with anyone else. I don’t consider “till death do us part” to be a valid construct for me. It never really has been—Kellie and I are twinned souls, and we fully intend to remain in a relationship for as long as we conceivably can be (and if that’s until the heat death of the universe, that sounds great to both of us).
But I started getting pushback on this intention pretty quickly after her death. And when I say “pretty quickly”, I mean before her celebration of life. They would say it in a variety of ways, but all those ways came down to the basic idea that I am relatively young and so should go out and pursue someone else as soon as I feel the time is right. Someone told me that I loved Kellie so much and treated her so well, and that I’m going to be able to love someone else equally well. Someone said that I need to not make my mind up about this so fast. Someone said that Kellie wouldn’t want me to be alone but would want me to find someone else who could make me happy like she did.
All of those responses were meant to be kind and loving, but all of them ignored the fact that I should have the right to know myself and what I need in my own life. All of them also ignored the fact that nobody but Kellie and I were in this relationship between the two of us, and so nobody but Kellie or I can reasonably say what Kellie or I wanted for the other. In addition, it’s pretty important for me to be able to make some decisions for myself in order to feel that I have some sense of control in my life, especially at this time when I have had so many things happen to me without my permission.
How this relates to the passage of time is that one of the objections that folks have had to decisions that I’ve made for myself (like this one) is that I’m just so new to being a widower, so I’ll surely change my mind eventually, but I just need to be patient and wait until I’ve been in it for long enough. So that means the longer it becomes since her death, the more I feel people will trust me to not be new and fresh to this, and to know what I want and need for myself. There’s also the issue of me not wanting to present myself as an expert in grief and loss if it’s something I’ve not experienced for very long. Making it another week or month gives me more confidence that I feel the ways that I feel and can speak to those things.
Keeping track of time also lets me show myself that I am making progress. And I am surely making progress. I am surviving. I am doing things I’ve never done before. I am finding joy and contentment in all kinds of areas of my life. But it’s easy to forget all of these things in the midst of a challenging day or challenging week. We have a tendency to focus on the difficult to the exclusion of the easy, and to focus on the challenging to the exclusion of the effortless. I want to remember that I’ve made it this long. I want to be reminded of how many things I’ve proven myself capable of doing. And keeping track of how long it’s been since the worst thing that’s ever happened to me helps me do that.
It’s been twenty-one weeks since Kellie died. And I’m still functioning. Somehow. I miss her more than I can possibly articulate to you. But I’m still waking up and breathing and eating and (sometimes) drinking water and (usually) taking my medication and (often) taking care of my work and other life responsibilities.
The funniest part of this entire day, for me, came when I was almost finished writing this post. It’s about how I’ve been keeping track of time (or struggling to do so). I speak openly here about how hard it is for me to stay situated in this moment. I also say that time is weird for me right now. And guess what? After texting ten or fifteen people that it had been twenty weeks, five months, since we lost Kellie, I decided to count. And it was then that I realized I’ve been miscounting for around a month and a half. Last week marked twenty weeks, five months, but I wrote back then that it was nineteen! It is a poetic justice beyond all other potential poetic justices that I get to finish up today’s installment about counting time by saying I’ve been counting it wrong after all. The humor of the universe strikes again. Ha!
I hope your day went well. Mine was surprisingly pleasant.
XOXO,
Matt