A Smiling Young Widow

As time goes on the finality of this settles in a bit more and I’ve needed to navigate moving forward. That opens up the question, how do I exist in this new reality?    

There is a process of “trying on” if or how everything fits in my new life, as I challenge myself to truly keep living. This happens at a snail’s pace, and I owe myself validation of how justified this pace is with how much has changed (thinking of secondary losses that didn’t just go away).

I was half joking with my therapist this week how cheese storage is one of those things. How I’ve been cutting mold off the sides of a block of cheese and sort of briefly thinking like hmm why is this moldy again? Then just carrying on about my day. I haven’t stopped to actually think about how it makes sense this has been a part of my new reality until this week. If you know Tom, you know he ate a lot. I like cheese, but I go through it at a much slower rate than we did before. So, it makes sense that even this cheese mold situation is actually part of navigating my new life; it has been for a while, probably honestly a couple years whenever I buy the big block on sale, but there was so much else taking priority brain space that I just cut off the mold as needed and carried on.

That’s been the story with so much in this grief journey ­­– when your life has turned upside down, it takes time to get through the list of everything that needs addressed. Big and small. Lots of this is unseen, even to me, but its waiting for its turn, just like the cheese mold this week. (Side note – if anyone has really good tips on how to store a block of cheese in the fridge let me know. I think I’ll finally check into the humidity that drawer is set to too.)

Sometimes I worry I’m stuck in this grief, frozen and not moving forward at all, then I remind myself how vast this loss is. Over the past year I’ve partially written a bunch of blog posts on this theme­ as I’ve reflected on what can feel like taking really, really slow steps. I figured it was time to go back and share a few:

The Yellow Jacket

This week I packed up Tom’s yellow jacket he’d wear for snowboarding and really for all our winter activities (Tom would basically wear just that one coat or a hoodie. That was it. I have like six jackets for all the different activities!)

There have been stages of clothing donation, I’ve talked about that before. The jacket fell into the category of things I couldn’t let go of; it took a while for me to decide I was ready to not see Tom’s snowboarding stuff sitting in its spot right next to my ski gear. So many memories are held in that jacket.

The song “Memory Lane” by Haley Joelle feels like it could have been written specifically about my Tom, talking about a yellow coat and bad jokes. Gets me every time.

I’ve been doing a bunch of skiing this year. Last year I didn’t do as much – maybe it was too hard or too early, and I really missed/miss having my buddy to hit the hill with. This year I signed up for a couple ladies ski groups, figured it was time to embrace the “try it out” mentality as it applied to skiing. I was reflecting on how I am literally paying for people to socialize with now, Tom used to gladly do this shit with me for free! I’m kind of kidding, kind of not. It does suck to have found things you liked together, and then be left needing to sort through what they can look like now for just me. Within the “how do I exist in my new reality” question lies so many more – Will I still ski? Do I like it? Do I enjoy going alone? Do I try to meet new people to ski with?

It was a given that Tom and my weekend plans were intertwined. I truly do appreciate all the supportive people I have in my life. It’s just different. There’s less people that would/could pick up and head to the hill with me now ­– that’s the phase of life we’re in – people get busy with their own partners and little families, or there’s old injuries, or only so much time to go into extracurricular and that’s eaten up elsewhere.

I remember last summer people would ask if I’d been doing many backpacking trips. I’d politely answer something like oh not too much yet, hoping to get out later in the summer. But what I should have been willing to say was – while I appreciate that you are asking questions about what I’m up to, I need to remind you that a weekend of backpacking was something Les and Tom did. What would ya’ll be saying if I was still taking off into the backcountry for a few nights alone with just Frank? I’m not sure if that would make me or others more nervous! 

“Who knew death must be so damn polite”
(A quote I scribbled down while reading Clap When You Land)

Work Decisions

The decision looms about what to do about work, and I am feeling it. Anxiety is visiting, a bit too often for my liking. I’m trying hard not to identify with it, remember it is just stopping by like any other emotion can do. There’s a massive overwhelm and overthink that threatens at all times though. It can pull me away from how hard I’ve worked to find joy in little moments.

Each time I talk about work with someone else ­– friends, family or a professional ­– I take something from that conversation to reflect on. Sometimes it can make me doubt myself, sucking away the belief that I am making the right decision, and other times it can help me reframe this decision in a different way than I have before. A couple of those conversations have happened where it was suggested that my job offered security and reliability. This was a big a-ha to reflect on, and not how most other people would. What is security? That is a lot of what I have lost since Tom died. Things like guaranteed pay, vacation time, benefits, pension … that doesn’t offer me as much of a sense of security anymore, though I totally would have thought differently pre-Tom dying too. Maybe I’m holding on to the job as it might allow me to grasp desperately for the security of my old life that I miss, but I know a reliable job isn’t what’s going to give me that. Tom is dead. My sense of security and predictability in the world is shattered. That’s probably why I’ve ended up being so focused on finding little bits of awe, looking for those small little things that can fill me with joy ­– I’m not so sure I can trust the big ones. 

(I also struggle a lot with this privilege I have and need to acknowledge that too… of course I still have security in the sense that I own a home, I have savings and safety nets that have let me continue to pay my mortgage and bills, I have skills and experience that make job finding relatively easy, I’ve been able to do other things to make money, I do not have anyone threatening my physical and mental safety, I can afford to buy food and not worry one bit about that.)

Society expects that we have certain anchors. Especially as a childless woman, it would be expected that work is a big part of my identity. Why am I living here if not for my job? The big questions ­– who am I now? what am I doing now? ­what gives me purpose? – they are ones I still very much need to explore, with time to continue this “trying on” phase.

It’s not so much that I get to as much as I have to make these changes. I wish desperately I could go back to doing a job I was kind of meh about and focus instead on fun outdoor adventures and planning ahead for a future with Tom. In case that isn’t obvious, I still wish I could go back to that mundane that was our usual lives, though it wasn’t mundane at all because we’d already made changes for a really cool work life balance. Tom and I lived well; however, I still have little regrets that sneak in where I wonder what we could have done more of together or wishing I would have leaned into appreciating every little thing, living in the moment with gratitude. Why did I waste any time thinking about the future or thinking I needed to have a plan for us? The whole idea of financial planning for the future, well what good did that do Tom? I’m thankful every day that we were in a position we could be both saving and enjoying our day-to-day. Like what if Tom had died and we’d lived our lives just dreaming about the travels we’d do in retirement? Nothing is guaranteed. Other people can’t get this, I know, you still look forward with hope if your life is intact. Maybe one day I can get back there, but for now I am still much more focused on just getting through the now.  

There has been so much internal dialogue where I tell myself to just get over this, I’m so lucky to have had a leave to give me space to decide what I should do, so now suck it up and make a choice. But am I supposed to just amalgamate back into the old life I had? Trying that on triggered a visceral reaction in my body, so I know that absolutely does not fit. Then the question sneaks in, am I even ok enough to make this decision?  Am I so overwhelmed that I want to just have a choice behind me? I’m in fact not “lucky” to have these choices to make. That’d be like saying I’m “lucky” my husband is dead. Still dead. I don’t deserve my own thoughts of minimizing just how much this derailed my plans or what I thought my life would look like. That piece is still painful and something I’m just starting to wrap my head around.

So, I focus on “for now”. Working to reframe that these are not huge decisions, they aren’t forever. I’ll make the choice. I’ll move forward. It’s a move that is scary and will open up a whole other unknown phase of this grief journey…

Small Steps, And No Rush

I think it was Megan Devine who suggests using a puke index to decide when it’s time to do certain things. Say going through your dead spouse’s things, some of that can be dealt with whereas the idea of moving some things out of your home makes you feel physically ill. It’s a good analogy, acknowledging the saying “when it feels right” is total BS. It’s a platitude that doesn’t acknowledge the pain of untwining a shared life. None of this feels right. It never will feel right that Tom died at 36 years old or that I’m left here living our life.

Somethings have changed though and hit the point where I can say hmm yeah ok this is not at the vomit-inducing level, I can do it. The clearing out of more of his things ­– they aren’t Tom. Finally cancelling the Netflix account that had his name there on the screen too. Clearing out some toiletries, but also being ok that they don’t all need to go. His old beard brush can stay in the drawer. Realizing that there are physical things of Tom’s that I won’t ever get rid of, and that’s also ok. I cleared out the garage awhile ago – that felt very much like it should have been a Tom job, but proud of me for doing it. It is this weirdness of how much our combined stuff is now mine to decide about. Tom brought his truck into our relationship. It became our truck, and I’d drive it way more than he did as he’d take the vehicle that was better on fuel for his longer drives to work. It was getting up there in kilometres, we’d decided it was in its retirement years but it was good to keep on old truck around. Now, it’s like do I need a truck? Do I want a truck? Should it stay? There’s still a lot of work to do on deciding what stays or goes or changes.

Even socializing applies to the puke index. Early on, the idea of going anywhere that might mean I was interacting with people beyond what felt were in my safe circle – that was absolutely registering high on the, gah I think I’ll be sick. It was something I had to ease into, slowly trying on being in different situations again. Having the conversations where it would inevitably come up that my husband had died, navigating what comes next. Thinking about answers I wanted to give to certain questions. Finding the balance of avoiding uncomfortable conversation, but also not avoiding the topic of Tom as that doesn’t feel good either. I’ve gotten more comfortable socializing again, but I’m still not back to my old self. Sometimes it feels like a two steps forward, one step back kind of thing with deciding just how much I want to put myself out into the world. I still need more time to recharge.

It was over a year ago that I wrote about the loneliness of grief, and that was more in the unique experience of how we each grieve for the same person. I think now it’s about the loneliness hitting in my new reality. In therapy and in my own reflective work, I’ve been peeling back the layers of what Tom and I had. It has been painful to start to pick out the pieces of what I valued and appreciated about us and the life we built, then try to think of them as something I could have without Tom. That was definitely high on the vomit-inducing level early on ­­– the first conversation I had about this with my therapist, I just broke down and cried. I wasn’t ready. Like absolutely hitting the nail on the head that this is where I need to go and the work that I need to do to be able to move forward. I know I have to see a future here for myself, need to give myself permission to build that. If it were up to Tom, I can guarantee he would have told me get over him immediately (insert eye roll, I’ll never “be over” this guy). It’s separating out Tom, my person, from some of those values. Honouring all that he taught me and how he has shaped me, and still moving forward one tiny step at a time. It’s tough to swallow and certainly still a work in progress. 

So, to wrap-up, the advice I’m giving myself these days is to still give grace in this process. As I look back at what I’ve written over the past year it reminds me again that this really is a process and everyday there is still work going on. There is nothing in my life that hasn’t been touched by losing Tom.