Carry on Castle: Living with Grief

School has been in for exactly one month now. Baby girl is 9 and in 4th grade this year. You may be able to sense from my title that so far it is not the best school year we've ever had. Now I absolutely love and adore her school. They were amazing even before Dan died, and since they have only gotten better But it has been a rough start to the year. Like all things I'm sure of what it is and not sure what it is. It is the big thing: her dad is still dead and she is still learning how to survive without him just like we all are. You put that with some little things like her best friend not being in her class and her having a new teacher and you get the rough month we have had. Since Dan died baby girl has had a lot of anxiety. A lot, It is how she is doing her grief. She strives so hard to be normal and act like daddy dying doesn't bother her that everything else in the world worries her.  I don't blame her she has great reasons. In less then two years her dad died ou...

I skipped church last week, and the week before that, and probably the week before that. No wait I went somewhere in there. But I've been skipping a lot of church. Basically all summer, I think I went to church three times all summer. Now i'm not one that thinks you have to go to church every single week or you'll go to hell. But I do think you should go on a regular basis because community is good for your soul. I grew up in a Catholic church and we went to church EVERY SUNDAY. You only got out of church if you were physically puking. However we weren't as bad as my cousins, they even had to go to church when they were camping. When I was a teenager I started going to  a Christian youth group.  I don't remember exactly when but it was spring. That summer I went to church camp and meet Dan. I've told you this story. From that point on nearly every religious experience I've had was with Dan. Dan and I went to church together, even in high school. Dan and I we...

                                                                                                            Dan and I in high school I read this article about grief the other day. I do that now, read articles on grief, pretty much anything I can get my hands on. I guess i'm trying to find feelings I can relate to. I have, many articles describe how I feel, yet none of them are exactly me. I have meet other young widows and I am glad to know I am not totally alone, although it sucks that they are here with me. But I haven't meet anyone quite like me, I have yet to find the support group for young widows who met their husband when they were 16 and fell madly in love and were still as madly in love with them 15 1/2 years lat...

My brain is all a jumble the last week or so.  To say I miss Dan is the biggest understatement that ever existed. My soul does not function right without him. In an effort to unjumble here are some random thoughts. I started turning my electric blanket on. I love to be all warm and snugly in bed. Dan did not. Dan was always too hot, Dan was always throwing his blankets off. It was common for me to be sleeping under three blankets and him to be sleeping under none. Baby girl is exactly like her father in this way. The electric blanket was always too hot for Dan, even though we had separate controls, my side still made him too hot. I miss Dan throwing the blankets off and turning my electric blanket down when he thought I was asleep. I bought new appliances for my new house today. I have never in my life bought new appliances, we always got hand me downs from a relative or craigslist. Yet another milestone I thought I would be doing with Dan. The sales man said "Can your husband...

So baby sister is getting married. I have mentioned this before. 10ish more days ahhhhh. This weekend we had her bachelorette party. Her closest girl friends and family went to a cabin on the mountain to spend the weekend doing girly things. I was ordered by my therapist to relax and have fun and not worry about baby girl back home with grandma and grandpa. I mostly did just that. I have three sisters (I also have two brothers, but they are not in this story). Yes my parents had six kids. Yes we are all from the same two parents. No we are not Mormon. Yes we are Catholic. This is what we grew up saying to other people. I am very close with my sisters, I can't imagine it any other way. My sisters know me in a way no one else does. After all we've known each other since we were born. Dan and my brother in laws would always tease us that when we get to talking we have our own "language" They call it "Steffen speech" (my maiden name). I guess it's basicall...

I grew up in a very large Catholic family. People died all the time, we went to funerals all the time.  In high school I went to so many relatives funerals that one of my teachers actually thought I was making it up to get out of class. Death was a part of life. And even though those were mostly grandparents and I loved them dearly, it is nothing like going to your husbands funeral. I've been to two funerals since my dead husbands 20 months ago. The first one was my husbands grandmother who died almost exactly two months after Dan did.  She fell shortly after Dan died and broke her pelvis, eventually dying from complications brought on by that. Sometimes I think the shock of Dan's death is the real reason she fell. I was barley functioning but yet baby girl and I got on a plane to Minnesota (That story is worth a blog all by itself). I had to go, I had to be at grandmas funeral, she was our family, Dan should have been there, but he wasn't. It was excruciating to go throu...

This will likely be a disjointed blog. Why? Because today is the 12. I hate the 12. In case you don't know the 12 is the day Dan died. January 12, 2015. It was the worst day of my life and I pray I will never have a day worse then it. 20 months today. Now I have a confession to make, and it feels very strange saying it. For the first time since Dan died I did not wake up on the 12 and go "crap today's the 12" It was not the first thought in my head even though I knew yesterday that it was coming. The first thought in my head was "Crap (or maybe perhaps fuck) it's 7:30 we're going to be late for school" and then I thought "well that makes sense today's the 12" You see things always go wrong on the 12, always. Things that seem random and non related to grief. Things that in a normal life wouldn't be that big of a deal, but in grief they are because you know you just can't handle one more thing on this day. It's like the wo...

When a grown up says they want to run away, their friends usually say something like "ya ya me too what tropical island are we going to?" and you talk about what you will do on said tropical island or rather what you won't do and what you will drink. But theres no follow through, You never go, you don't actually mean it, You always stay and be the responsible grown up.  I've meet hundreds of people that say they want to run away, I've never seen any of them actually do it. I say I want to run away almost every day, I've yet to do it but I am getting closer and closer to following through with my convictions. When a child says they want to run away, they mean it. They are determined. They pack a bag.  Well today baby girl had had enough of this dead daddy business and she decided to run away. I think really it started yesterday. Yesterday we got the keys to our new house. Now, as a general rule, no a hard and fast no compromise rule baby girl hates chan...

I bought a house today. Yes I did. I don't get the keys until tomorrow so it doesn't really feel real, but I went into a office today and signed my name 5,000 times. Buying a house is an odd experience. It's even odder when it feels wrong.  This is a great little house and I love it and I am excited to move in. I am going to live there until I'm 95, wherein I will die and leave it to baby girl. But its wrong like the whole last 19 months have been wrong. It's without Dan. I just bought a house today without my husband and that feels wrong. I walked into that office today all by myself, not holding my husbands hand, not giddy with excitement, not looking over at him and smiling.  I got there and they said "are you here to close on a house" "yes" I replied "just you" "Yes" I reply as I look down at my wedding ring, it's just me. The lady makes small talk with me "have you lived in Oregon your whole life?"...

8 months after Dan died I re-did my bedroom. I want to say I decided to redo my bedroom but I didn't. I guess in a way I did because it was my decision, but like all the decisions I've made since Dan died I felt like it was a decision I was forced to make. After all I would never have done it if Dan were still alive. There would be no need to. Through therapy we discovered that hey maybe it wasn't the best idea in the world to be reminded of your husband dying every time you walked in your bedroom. Now  part of thats true and part of its not. I mean your going to be reminded no matter what. He's not there, he's not in your bed with you, he died. That doesn't go away. But at the same time maybe if we could make my room more peaceful and slightly different it wouldn't be as bad. So in one weekend my besties came over and we painted and rearranged my room. This included getting rid of Dan's clothes and Dan's dresser. How do you do that? My friends kep...

I wrote this awhile ago but I like it. Mint. Dan hated mint. I love mint. He hated it so much that he wouldn’t kiss me if I had eaten anything with mint. He hated mint so much that he would use children’s fruity toothpaste. Mint mochas are one of my favorites, and he hated them. But it wouldn’t stop him from bringing me one home from  Starbucks  when I was having a hard day. It didn’t stop him from making me a homemade one and bringing it to me as I cuddled our daughter on the couch. I haven’t had a mint mocha since he died. They don’t appeal to me anymore. Eggs. Dan loved eggs. He would eat eggs every single morning.  If we ran out of eggs it was a travesty in our house. We bought chickens for the soul purpose of him being able to have fresh eggs. I remember when I was pregnant and had terrible morning sickness and was very sensitive to smells. One day he made eggs just like he always did, except all of a sudden I couldn’t stand the smell and I started ye...

Do you know what PTSD is? Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I bet you think you do.  You might say something like "ya its what people that go off to war have" true. You might say "It's when people see really terrible things" true. A few really smart people might say "ya my friend watched her beloved husband die and now she has it" very true. If you are a mental health professional you might say "ya a child who all of a sudden has a dad who dies will have it" also true.  I was telling a friend once about how life is now without Dan and she said "wow it's almost like you have PTSD or something." No not almost, we do. But what exactly is it? Well it's complicated. I can't describe it for baby girl because I am not in her mind (unfortunately) but I can try and describe it for me. I am hesitant to do so; it's not an easy thing to talk about, But if we are going on a the point of this blog is to be therapeutic for me and h...