Where do we go from here?

I’ve decided to start a blog separate from the Caring Bridge since Robert has passed and his illness would no longer be the focus of it.  I don’t have any set topics in mind for writing now. I suppose I’ll just say whatever comes to mind, since improvising has always worked for me before.

The last few weeks have felt like months. Every day stretches out forever, but I get very little done with all this time. It’s like more time I have to plan, the more the options seem to multiply and I can’t figure out where to go from one moment to the next. It’s the most alien feeling, not having to be anywhere in particular for the first time in two years. No more appointments or deadlines, no more hospitals or hospices to visit, no more job to plan around. It’s just me and Trey now, and I falter before the strangeness of having a choice. Most days, all I accomplish is taking care of Trey and maybe a phone call to handle Robert’s benefits and insurance issues. The rest of the day disappears with pointless web surfing, TV watching and pacing. 

My memories of Robert push to the front of my mind at all the expected times. I suppose there’s nothing new under the sun when it comes to grief. I’ll see his folded-up flag lying on my window bench, or his Bass t-shirt hanging in my closet, and I push away the tide of memories that come rolling in. There’s too much of his stuff and not enough of him for me to breathe. When I think of a negative memory, I don’t fight it as much. They don’t feel like a punch in the gut. I’m more prepared to handle the bad than the good.

I haven’t wanted to speak to anyone lately, and I am sorry for that. I’m terrible at being the gracious widow. I’m exhausted and impatient and my mind follows a broken track of logic.  I want to climb up into a treehouse and read comic books and eat candy until my mother makes me come home at night.

The last two years have aged me ten, I think. How can it have only been two years? Two years is not enough.