Don't panic, it's just a grocery store

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 million times Dan and I were high school sweethearts. We got married when I was 19. What this means is my entire adult life I have bought food for the two of us, then the three of us. There were times in college when we were dirt poor and the shopping list literally consisted of top ramen, cereal, and milk. Dan was a milk a holic. Between him and baby girl we went through two gallons of milk about every 4 days . I'm not a milk drinker so I didn't contribute to this problem.

I remember one time we were out of milk and I asked Dan to pick some up on his way home. We did this often because we were always out of milk. For reasons I still don't know he came home with only one gallon of milk instead of two. I was pretty furious about it. I mean who does that, just buys one gallon of milk. "That's going to last us two days if your lucky and you are going back to the store to buy more not me" I told him. He said I wasn't specific on how much he was supposed to buy, uh common sense man.

I was always in charge of the shopping. If Dan went shopping he would come home with weird stuff. I more or less bought the same ingredients every shopping trip.  I bet you can relate, you know where all the stuff is in your store, you know what brands you like. You know you are always out of spaghetti and hamburger, rice pilaf was one of his favorites. 15 years I shopped like this, generally at the same grocery store every time. Dan hated mushrooms, only buy mushrooms if I'm going to eat them. Dan loved mt Dew. If I'm feeling splurgey I'll get him some mt dew. Dans favorite pizza was pepperoni, I hate pepperoni. I always bought two different kinds of pizza. Eggs, lots and lots of eggs, every single morning we would each eat two or three eggs. Buy 5 dozen eggs and hope it lasts. Milk. always always get at least two things of milk. If I think there's room in the fridge I'll get three. This is how grocery shopping went for 15 years.

Then he died.

Then when I tried to go grocery shopping again (after all that magic food stopped appearing in my fridge)  I would get panic attacks in the grocery store. Because my husbands dead and every single thing I have put in my cart for the last 15 years doesn't work anymore. None of it. Lets buy mushrooms, but dan doesn't like mushrooms, but that means I can buy more cause he's not here, but that means I don't want to buy any because he's not here to tell me how gross they are. Lets buy milk, uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh milk is hard. Dan's not here to drink it, so I don't need to buy as much, baby girl still drinks it like nobody's business. If I buy my usual 2 it will last longer and I'll have to go to the store less. But maybe two now will last too long and it will go bad. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh what do I do? I stare at milk, in the milk aisle, in the middle of the busy grocery store. I freeze, I don't know what to do. Then my ears start whooshing like all the noise is blurring together. Then I bite my lip to try and keep my tears in. Then my brain is screaming "he's dead, he's dead, he's dead" Then I feel like I need to sit on the floor, sometimes I do, in the middle of the store, just sit on the floor and try to take deep breathes. Thats what they tell you to do when you panic, take deep breathes, I wonder if the people that tell you this realize how hard it actually is to do in the moment.  Sometimes it's not that bad and I can take deep breathes as I walk away (forgetting the milk of course). A few times I left and sat in my car and cried.

The milk is just an example of the worst of it. When you go shopping and your husbands dead, every single aisle feels like that. Every single aisle is a decision about what you should or should not buy now. Every single item on the shelf is a reminder of what he liked or didn't like. Pretty soon you are going through the store as fast as you can just trying to get out of there while you still can. Dreading the checkout line because you will have to talk to somebody and you might loose it. Also you would be amazed how often things like family's come up in small talk at the grocery store. And saying "my husband is dead" is always awkward for strangers.

So how does one "move on" from panicking in grocery stores. Uhhhhhhh, wellllllll. I'll get back to you. I can tell you what I did. I stopped. I stopped going grocery shopping. I stopped going to that store entirely. I bought as little as possible at a time. I would run in for a gallon of milk and some bread. The next day I would run in for chicken nuggets and french fries. I never bought eggs anymore, I didn't want to eat them without him. Highly efficient i know, but it got me in and out.  I also stopped cooking, really just stopped. I didn't have much appetite anyway so it didn't matter much to me. Baby girl was ecstatic with instant food. Fiends and family were awesome about bringing us food so we often had stuff that just needed to be warmed up. Everything I cooked was instant or easy. Baby girl and I had a steady diet of chicken nuggets and french fries, cereal, pizza, bread. If it took more then 20 minutes I wasn't going to make it.

Then my friends got me involved in a food co-op sort of thing. You pay a monthly fee and then you get whatever food you want. However they only have certain things at certain times. For me this was awesome. First of all it took all the thinking out of it, which I liked. I didn't have to think about if dan would eat it or wouldn't eat it cause he's dead. I didn't have to walk past a million things that reminded me of him, only about 1,000 which was so much better. You just took what they have. If they have clam chowder that week, you eat clam chowder, bam done, no thinking.  It was good for me. It also forced me to cook the meals.

Then I moved in with my in laws and they insist on feeding us (very well by the way, my mother in law is an excellent cook). So I stopped going to the food co-op as well. I will likely go back to it when we move out again. I likely won't go back to the main grocery store for awhile yet.

I have heard lots of widows and widowers have this problem in grocery stores. We rarely consider it it but so much of relationships include food. Food is not the same without your spouse to enjoy it with you. (man I could go on and on with grief and food, another time.)

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