Carry on Castle: Living with Grief

I was one month old when Mt. St Helens erupted. I don’t remember it any other way. But my parents do. My parents have a jar of ash they collected off their car the next day. They lived about 2 and a half hours away and they could see the explosion from their yard. All growing up we had pictures of the mountain exploding lining our hallways. A tribute to an extraordinary event. It is one of those days you talk about what you were doing the moment it happened because you remember. I don’t remember, I was too young. Baby girl was seven when her daddy died. When her life exploded. It’s older then a month but my biggest fear is that it is not old enough to remember what it was like before. That she will say I don’t remember what life looked like before. We have an urn of ashes. Our halls are lined with pictures of the life before. A tribute to an extraordinary event. Will they mean anything to her? Or will she just listen to me talk about it. A life she doesn’t remember because she was...

We spent Thanksgiving with family as most people do. Wednesday night we had thanksgiving with my family. Thursday we had Thanksgiving with Dans family. This has been our tradition for many years now. Last year at both family gatherings I spent time in the bathroom crying. This year I didn't do that. An outsider might say that that makes this Thanksgiving better then the last. That's not necessarily true. Not better, just different, perhaps better at controlling crying. In truth we really had a wonderful thanksgiving with both families. As always there was the weird non presence of Dan. It didn't belong at thanksgiving, Dan belonged at thanksgiving not his missing hole. However it is always good to be with family. Baby girl especially had a great time. She was surrounded by one of her favorite people groups: UNCLES. Baby girl loves her uncles, they kinda love her too. She spent two days of being picked up and spun around and tickled and chased and and pulled through the ...

I look in the mirror and I feel tired. I look tired too but I emanate a feeling of constant tired. Like an aura surrounding me. An aura of tiredness. That’s all that’s left. The joy is gone. The light in my eyes is gone. That “red headed spark” I was known to have has vanished. My magic is gone. All that’s left is tired. I get up every morning and my mother in law asks if I slept well because I look so tired. I slept as well as I always do now, which isn’t well at all. I’m just always tired. I see my friends and they say I look tired, that I’m working too hard. Yes, I’m working twice as hard now, no ten times as hard, you have to account for the grief not just simply the missing person. I go to therapy and she tells me I look tired, she tells me to practice self care, I try, I’m still tired. No amount of rest, or sleep, or fancy massages is going to cure my tiredness. I see lines on my face, my cheeks are hollow, even though I’ve lost no physical weight. It’s just sank off my cheeks...

Baby girl and I both had bad days. Nothing drastic, I was just having a very sad missing my husband day and baby girl didn't have a good time at her play date. Part of me thinks it was for the same reason I was having a sad day. That she knows even though she doesn't know. Part of me thinks being 9 just sucks. Exactly two years ago today is when my life started to change. I didn't realize it then, I was oblivious to it in fact. I had no clue that in 6 short weeks my soul mate would die in an instant. The thought never crossed my mind. Two years ago today Dan had a few seizures, The doctors switched his medication. Six weeks later he died of a siezure. Like most of them it started in the middle of the night. The Sunday before Thanksgiving 2014. We were asleep and I woke up to the bed shaking. Dan had had a siezure. It was so short by the time I turned the light on and sat up it was over. He rolled over and started snoring. I shook his arm and he tried to shove me away. H...

So I have this house I bought in September. It needs a lot of fixing, so I'm fixing it before we move in. It is extremely frustrating. It turns out I can't do as much of it by myself as I thought I could. Frustrating. The stuff I can do by myself isn't very much fun by myself. Frustrating. Like my whole entire life now, everything is without Dan. I am trying to make a home without Dan. FRUSTRATING. I am one of the lucky ones. I have an amazing support system of family and friends who want to help me. I know a lot of people don't have that.  I even have some that are quite skilled in house remodel. The problem is they all have lives. They have families. They have jobs. They have better things to do then fix my house even though they do want to help me. It's ok. I get it. Dan was the type of person who didn't let his job go away after he got home. He had the type of job that couldn't go away when he got home. Dan was in charge of a facility for mentall...

I never really loved cooking. I never really minded it, but I didn't love it. It was just what you did to get food. If you did it good the food then tasted good. Win Win. I did love baking, because that food always tasted good. I would say I'm an average cook. I can make some things really really well and I make some things really really bad. Spending hours every day preparing food was never really my thing. Dan was an ok cook. He could cook and did often but he liked to experiment with food. He liked to put weird combinations together and see how they came out. If they came out good, then great we would eat it. If it came out bad he would eat it anyway because he was one of those guys that would eat anything. I would eat a bowl of cereal. So I never loved night when he experimented because you never knew what you were gonna get. (some people might say that one of the few things baby girl gets from me is that hating change stuff. But that is another story) As I've said a ...

I never in my wildest crazy weird alternate dimension dreams imagined this would be me. First of all as I've said a million times, this was never supposed to happen. This isn't my life. I am not a single parent. I am not a 36 year old widow. Dan and I were forever, we always knew we would be together forever. We talked about dying but it was always when we were done with life, 95 or 100. We would cash in our life insurance and go on a crazy adventure. We would die together, flying an airplane, or going bungee jumping or swimming with sharks. Whatever it was it would be big and it would be together. Second, I still hold that I am not a writer. Dan was the writer in this family. Dan was an amazing writer. If you don't believe me there are links to his writing in the upper right of this page, read them and then you will understand what I mean. Yet here I am being a single mother. Here I am being a 36 year old widow. As much as I don't want to be here, here I am. In a ...

Warning: This may be a rough one for you family Dan started having seizures his senior year of High School. That was 1997 if you would like to know how old we are. No one can say with 100% certainty why he started having them but we suspect it was from being knocked around in his many years of being on the wrestling team.  I remember when he first told me. We hadn't been dating that long, a month maybe. I was in the kitchen of my parents house and he came over to visit. He stood just inside the doorway and I had my back turned to him talking away. I turned around and looked into his beautiful bright blue eyes (I loved his eyes, they were my favorite physical feature of his) All around his eyes were bright red dots, like little pin pricks, especially under his eyes. "what happened to your face" I said astonished. He didn't answer. I thought perhaps he had gotten in a fight or something and I asked him again. Tears welled up in his eyes as he told me he had had a...

I baby sat my niece today. Shes in kindergarten but they didn't have school today. Shes what you would call a firecracker, always pushing the limits. Don't worry parents she was perfectly well behaved today. I'm just saying in general. Baby girl did have school today so it was just me and my niece. We worked on our new house. She mostly played on her tablet, I moved stuff from our rented pod to our shed so we could send the pod back.  But for a little while she joined me and followed me back and forth across the yard. "whew Aunties tired"  I say. "ya auntie you should take a break" Sweetie says "O I wish I could but I have to get this done sweetie"  Sweetie "well, if uncle Dan were here he could help you and then you could both take a break" Yes indeed IF uncle Dan were here. What I wouldn't give to be doing this moving project with Dan, and then we could take a break together, Sit on the couch with Dan while he holds my hand,...

Dan's best friend from high school won a very important award today. Something he had worked toward his whole life. He honored Dan with it saying " In Honor of blank and Dan Stults. I hope in the years to come I am able to slightly make the kind of difference to my athletes that the two of you made for me. I miss you both everyday, but your persistence, courage, and heart is always with me."  Dan would be very proud of you my friend, he would say something about how he knew you would always make it someday, and then tell an embarrassing story about you.   When I saw this post it caught me off guard. I wasn't expecting it, our friend doesn't do facebook and posted this on his wife's page. Dan and I haven't seen this friend since their own wedding at least 10 years ago. Unfortunately, he wasn't able to make it to Dan's funeral. Did I mention they were best friends in high school. And in case you don't know high school is hard, they really carri...

“No, they won't understand you, they will call you depressed, self-indulgent, mad, but you will smile, for you are like the daffodil, and you never wanted to be understood.” - excerpted from a longer piece by Jeff Foster, www.lifewithoutacentre.com Yes. But maybe I am. Maybe I am depressed, maybe I am self-indulgent, maybe I am mad. But I smile I do not care if they understand. I do not care anymore what they think of me. Daffodils? Are daffodils misunderstood? I never knew, I’ve always understood them. I spent the last two weeks planting 450 daffodil bulbs around my yard of my new house, we haven’t unpacked, we haven’t painted, we haven’t moved in. But I planted daffodils. I think people thought I was mad. 450 really? Don’t you think that’s over kill. Isn’t 50 daffodils plenty.  Uh no, I don’t think it’s overkill. I would plant more and might still if I can find the time.  This is what I know about daffodils that no one else knows, or rather remembers. Daffod...

I went to therapy the other day. I know I do that a lot, every week in fact. She usually asks about what I have blogged about over the last week and I tell her. "Ah your a writer" she says. For the millionth time I say "No, I'm not a writer. Dan is the writer" she continues "do you like writing?" yes? "Does it make you feel better" definitely. "Then you are a writer, you don't have to have perfect grammar and spelling to be a writer, you just have to write" You know she is right a lot. Dang her! I started this blog this summer as a way to get all that grief stuff out of my head. I've grown to really like it. But the truth is even before I started blogging I was already writing about my grief. I journaled, I wrote letters to Dan, and I messaged my friends. It had to go somewhere. Normally I would have talked to Dan about it and he would have had the perfect response (whatever it would be, who knows what he has to say abo...

Pre P.S.  I may come off looking not so good in this one. So I went to grief therapy last week. Therapy is always interesting. Really everyone should go.  I don't remember exactly what I said but it was something along the lines of  "I hate it when people say I'm strong and brave etc. it's a bunch of crap, I'm not" and "people must be sick of me asking for help all the time, I really feel like I owe them"   To which she said something along the lines of "ya I know you really hate it when people say good stuff about you" We have had this conversation before in therapy, several times. I still hold that I am nothing special, I'm just trying to survive. Then my therapist gets an idea, a great idea, an awful idea, it's really a matter of opinion. She says "I'm going to give you homework this week. When people say your strong, say thank you, when people say your brave, say thank you. When people give you a compliment, say tha...

I don't talk about how Baby girl is doing in this whole grief thing. I don't talk about it a lot because she doesn't talk about it alot. She kinda avoids it as if it were zombies, actually I'm pretty sure she likes zombies better then talking about her dad. She has her reasons. Shes only 9, 7 when Dan died, she doesn't know what to do with all these crazy emotions so she pushes them away. I however embrace them (in case you couldn't tell) and find the more I talk about it the better I feel. I wish she would do that but it's not her way. Every once in awhile like every 5 months or so she will have a really deep 5 minute conversation with me about Dan. Then just like that she will change the subject again. The other day we had one of those conversations. I'm still in a little bit of shock about it so hey why not tell the world. So the other night we were driving home from our grief support group. At group the kids go downstairs and play and talk and the...

Dan was what you could call a collector. A collector of random things. "old stuff" was one of his favorites. He also had 1,000's (yes 1,000's) or old glass bottles. He loved books and so did I. I estimate we had over 2,000 books, 10% of which I would say actually belonged to me. The rest were Dan's.  Dan also loved rocks.  Every time we would go anywhere at all he would pick up a rock, or two, or three. If we went somewhere like the beach we would come home with a bucket of rocks every single time. He passed his love of rocks to Baby girl of course. So ever since she was old enough to carry a bucket she would come home with her own full of rocks as well. Now I appreciate a beautiful rock for sure, but I am much more particular about which ones are "keepers". Dan treated rocks the same way he treated people, every single one he picked up was a "keeper". Our rocks fell into three categories: exceptionally nice rocks that went on display in th...

                                                                                                     Dan and I, high school prom A girl I went to high school with died today from cancer. She's married and has two little kids.  I haven't talked to her in almost 20 years.  Yet her death is affecting me. To me she's still so young. Just like I knew her in high school. Vibrant and full of energy. Too young to die. I believe she was 35. I can fully imagine what her spouse and other family members are going through right now. Because now I have a clue, it's not the same, but I have a clue. In the before you truly have no clue. One of my favorite lines is from Lemony Snickets A Series of Unfortunate Events "If you have ev...

I asked my friend what I should blog about today. She gave me a great suggestion (which I'm not doing right now but I will get to) Then she said "and at the end throw in something your thankful for because it's November." You know, many people do this whole everyday in November post something your thankful for on Facebook. It's a good idea. but eh, then I would look like I'm doing it just because everyone else is doing it.  I don't say thank you a lot. I don't say please a lot either. I guess I have bad manners. To me they always seemed like something you had to say not something you actually meant. Again with the whole everybody else is doing it thing. Like saying fine when people ask you how your doing. We all know thats a crock but we do it because you are supposed to. Saying thank you always felt like a do it because your supposed to thing not a because you mean it thing. I guess I assume that people just know I'm thankful. I am thankful. Tru...

I have been putting things off lately. I just don't want to do them. I don't want to do laundry (my mother in law did it for me and again I say "what am I thinking moving out") I don't want to clean. I don't want to blog, I don't want to work on the new house. I don't want to do anything. Sleep I could definitely sleep. In case you don't know this is very unlike my character. My friend once called me "a special kind of J" he was referring to a personality test where a J is a get things done kind of person. a do it now kind of person. The special part is because he thinks I'm drastic even for a J.  Sometimes I think he regrets that his wife and I are besties. I've also been making him fix a lot of stuff since Dan died. He didn't make out very well in this deal. Dan was the opposite of a J. Dan was a P. I really truly considered Dan's procrastination abilities his worst trait. It drove me crazy. At the same time it was goo...