Climbing uphill

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 about his own death.)  Dan is not here and I needed someone to talk to. So I wrote.

In January it will be two years since Dan died. It sounds far away but it's only two months. I'm already thinking about it, I've been thinking about it, but more on that later. I've been scrolling through some old conversations I've had with friends and I found this piece I wrote around the one year anniversary of Dan's death. 

What do I mean when I say grief is hard? Something like this: For 362 days now I have been carrying and invisible backpack. It is full of my grief. It weighs about 1,000 pounds. For 362 days now my 8 year old daughter has had an invisible backpack full of her grief. It weighs about 1,000 pounds. An 8 year old can not possibly carry a 1,000 pound backpack, she can’t even lift it off the ground, it is too enormous for her. So I carry it for her. I carry both our griefs every single second of every single day, and it is so immensely heavy.

 Sometimes you may see me cry, or look out into space and you say “yes that is her grief” but you don’t realize that it is always there. It doesn’t go away just cause you don’t see it.  What you see is only a glimmer. I have taken one pound out of my backpack and shown it to you. Every single action, thought, blink of an eye has my husband in it. Why shouldn’t it? He was my soul mate, that doesn’t change just because he died. I didn’t stop loving him.

You don’t realize that when we are happy, when we are doing fun things, when we laugh,  to make those good days happen I am running uphill as fast as I can with 2,000 pounds on my shoulders. That’s how hard it is.

I could go on in detail about how every little thing is harder by yourself, how there’s no one there to grab you a glass of water cause you forgot and already sat down, how there is no one to help you carry the groceries in or take the trash out, but I am too tired  because all the weight in our backpacks wears me out.

Almost two years now and I am still carrying those backpacks. Thats just how it is.

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