The dead husband card.




I got this card 19 months ago. I call it my dead husband card.  It gets you things. It gets you free drinks at Dutch Brothers when they ask what your doing today and after a very long pause you decide to tell them the truth "I'm going to the beach to spread my dead husbands ashes" It gets your freezer stocked with food you did not make for about six months. It gets you lots of looks. Lots and lots of looks. It gets your daughter toys and candy. Lots of toys and candy. It gets you extra moving help when you suddenly get kicked out of your house. It gets your friends husbands to move heavy things for you and fix broken things. It gets you your daughters favorite teacher.

I think I try very hard not to use my dead husband card all that much. I don't want to over use it. I don't want people to start getting annoyed and saying "she uses that excuse all the time." I try to take care of me and baby girl with minimal help. The same amount of help we had when he was alive. There's the rub. He's not alive, in case you didn't hear Dan died. Those two words make life a million times harder then they used to be. Dan died. Our world is not the same. We do need extra help. 19 months later I'm still trying to figure life out.

Sometimes I play my dead husband card, when I feel I really need to. When I'm totally stressed out. When I need something like help moving, or buying a car, or buying a house. When baby girl needs me to.  When its something big I will use my dead husband card. It has to be good for something right.

Sometimes people just throw me the card without me mentioning it. They bring me coffee, they say take a break and rest. I love those people. 

Sometimes all the little things add up and you just don't want to do it anymore. You don't want to do anything. Sometimes its the 100th time baby girl has called your name in the last hour and you really resist the urge to say "ask your dad to help you" because you know that won't go over well. Sometimes its when you get phone call after phone call about things you need to do before you can buy a house. Sometimes its when you can't find what your looking for at the grocery store.  These things make you want to scream "BUT MY HUSBANDS DEAD DON'T I DESERVE A BREAK" shouldn't everything just work out now. Shouldn't life be easier. Certainly I have paid my dues to get an easy life with the dead husband. Shouldn't I automatically win the lottery even though I don't play. Why doesn't my dead husband card work for that. Shouldn't I have gotten an easy life card to play along with my dead husband card. Instead I got a life is even harder now card to play with the dead husband card. Nobody wants these cards and I have both of them. How is that fair? Its way worse then getting delt the old maid.


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

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