My therapist told me to start a blog

My therapist told me to start a blog. She thinks I have something worth while to say. Something? Yes. Worth while? I guess we will find out. I mean, everyone and their dog has a blog, right? What makes me so special? At the very least, I hope it will be cathartic.

Here is the short story, which I will elaborate on in future blogs. Eighteen months ago, I was 34. I had a 7 1/2 year old daughter. I was married to my high school sweetheart, and we were still madly in love with each other. It was like a fairy tale; we liked to compare ourselves to Wesley and Buttercup from The Princess Bride. We were in the process of adopting a baby.

And then we weren't. And then it was gone. In a second, literally one second, he was gone. My husband Dan died, extremely suddenly and unexpectedly.

All day long he was fine. We went downtown to our favorite bookstore, we ate lunch, we had dinner, we went to bed at 11. At 11:15 I called 911. At 12:01 am on January 12, 2015, Dan was pronounced dead on our living room floor. And that's it. That is the end of our life. Except I'm still living. Our daughter is still living.

Our whole beautiful boring life can be summed up in a few paragraphs. And yet I plan to write pages and pages about it.

So we Carry On. It is amazingly difficult, and yet we do it, day in and day out. One of my favorite lines from one of my favorite movies, Fried Green Tomatoes, says,

"A heart can be broken but it still keeps a-beatin', just the same."

That is exactly what we have been doing. Every day, I wonder how.

There is a reason we compared our lives to a fairy tale love. We were just that happy together. We were the couple that everyone would look at in disgust because we were so cute.  He always said,

"It wasn't love at first sight, but sometime between the first time I saw you and the very next breath I took, I fell in love."

Dan treated me like a princess. He was gentle and kind and fun and spontaneous. He was the best father, playing with our daughter and teaching her about life. He would get truly offended when people would ask if he was babysitting her. "It's not babysitting to take care of my own child!" he would say.

I'm a "say what you mean" kind of person. I was never any good at decoding stuff or finding the hidden meaning. I was never any good at reading people (although Dan was great at it.) Just say what you mean. In that vein of thought, I have no intention of hiding anything on this blog. If you are family reading this, it might be hard for you to hear. You can stop reading if you want or never begin. It won't hurt my feelings, I promise. This blog is mostly for me to express how it feels to live with half of your soul gone. Dan was half of my soul. Always. And if it helps someone grieving to feel not so  alone, good.

So let's blog about grief, and life. Dead husbands and extremely anxious daughters. And how we, to my eternal amazement, Carry On. Besides, I need something to do when I can't sleep at 3 in the morning.


P.S. My grammar and spelling are atrocious. I'm aware. Normally my husband (who is an excellent writer) would be happy to correct it for me but hes dead so he won't do it anymore. If it bothers you just keep it to yourself.

I wrote a book about my grief, you can read it here: Carry on Castle