Carry on Castle: Living with Grief

I called my sister in law today, I had something very important to say, "You tell your husband that he is a giant asshole"  I think she was taken aback by this, I don't generally call her husband (Dan's brother) an asshole, he's a pretty decent guy.  Nevertheless I was pretty pissed off at him.  I think she could tell by my voice something was up. When I called her I was standing in the middle of my bathroom, still dripping from just taking a shower,  and sobbing my head off.  "Whats going on?" she said.  My brother in law got a 3-d printer about a month ago (he's a nerd like that). So he decided he would make Christmas presents with it.  He made his parents and I each an image of Dan's face. It looked rough and was cut out of plastic, flat like an ornament you would hang on a tree. Honestly not much to look at. He said you hang it in the widow and the light shines through and it's an image of Dan.  Ok thanks. Dan's mom went and hung he...

Yesterday was Christmas. Probably everybody knew that. I have celebrated Christmas more or less the same way for the last 20 years. Dan and I would have Christmas with my family and Dan and I would have Christmas with his family.  I haven't missed a Christmas in 20 years. When we were in college we flew home. Sometimes we have celebrated on different days to accommodate everyone's schedules, one year there was a giant snow storm and we celebrated the next weekend. We have always found a way to make Christmas work with both our families.  This year was no different, we celebrated with Dan's family in the afternoon and then we went to my family in the evening.  I've been to 20 of these. Dan has only been to 17. He has missed the last three Christmases because he was dead.  We miss him every day but we miss him at Christmas too.  Baby Girl jumped on me at 5:21 AM. "come on mommy, get up, it's Christmas"  she didn't jump on daddy, he didn't roll ov...

"Mommy tell me a story, a daddy story"  "I always tell you stoires, you tell me a daddy story. Tell me a story about you and daddy going Christmas shopping for mommy" "No I don't remember" "Well I bet it was fun, you got to spend the whole day with daddy"  I hear sniffling in the back seat.  "I bet you went to lots of stores, and out to lunch, can you remember? Tell me about it" "NO" she throws her toy against the seat "I don't remember ok, I don't remember Christmas shopping with Daddy I only remember Christmas shopping for you with auntie"  Shes sobbing in the back seat as I'm driving.  It's two days before Christmas. She hasn't had a grief attack like this since summer. I just blogged about how well she is doing.  "Talk about something else mommy" "ok Baby Girl, ok." Baby Girl and daddy always went Christmas shopping for me. They did it for my birthday to...

It's the middle of the afternoon and I'm drinking coffee out of my cup that says "Dying is easy, Living is harder." It certainly feels like it today. Have I written about this mug before? I don't remember. Its a line from Hamilton, I liked it so much I made myself a mug. Pretty purple swirly flowers and fancy handwriting. So that you have to try hard to actually read it. So many times I feel like Dan got the easy way out. We were supposed to go out together, with a bang even. Always together, we would have never ever left each other. So far the first two days of Christmas break have basically been really crappy. I went into the christmas season telling myself I was going to make myself happy this Christmas. This will be the third Christmas without him, it's time I guess. I can do it. I'm stubborn as hell I can make myself happy if I just try hard enough. That's what we are going to do, we are going to have a good christmas this year. It's more ...

  At the beginning of the school year I told Baby Girls new teacher (5th grade, seriously) our story. You know the one about how in the middle of second  grade I woke Baby Girl up in the middle of the night to tell her that her daddy was dead. That's always a great story to start off with. I guess I figure its better to get it over with, maybe it will create less awkwardness later. I told her about how hard life has been since than and how this grief thing is worse then anyone can possibly imagine.  I told her about how Baby Girl (and I) just basically shut down for the last two years. She responded with "well how could you not"  It was then that I knew this teacher got us. We had had a really good summer.  I finally felt like ok maybe we could deal with this grief thing. I relayed this information to her teacher and how I wanted to keep this good momentum going. How above else we could not have another year like last year where Baby Girl came home from school...

I think my computer is dying. It runs really slow and keeps telling me the memory is full and I need to delete programs. It's missing a key and the number pad doesn't work. Baby Girl spilled my coffee on the keyboard the summer after Dan died so a bunch of the keys stick.  It's about four or five years old which I suppose is ancient for a computer these days.  Dan and I bought this computer,  at the store, by ourselves.  We are not tech savy people, and are content with things like two year old phones and hand me down laptops. It was not the fanciest computer by any means, in fact I think it was the cheapest one the store had.  But it was the first computer we actually bought by ourselves and we were proud of it. It was kind of like buying a new car, for us anyway.  Dan set the computer up, again we are not tech people so that was also a big accomplishment.  He named it Klaus after a character in a TV show we were watching at the time. I don't really...

Blogging is not working for me this week. I start a blog and I erase it. I write half a blog and I go to sleep and realize in the morning that it is total garbage. That's probably what all my blogs are but when you push the post button at three in the morning you don't realize it. I didn't realize it but this has been a tough week. I think I spent so much energy telling myself it was ok that I didn't make any room for it not being ok. I guess really it started with last week. Last week: I am going to be happy about Christmas damit. I am going to like Christmas again damit. I am going to put up my decorations damit. I am going to buy all the presents damit. I am going to wrap them damit. I am going to have fun doing all these things damit. I am going to make this work damit. I am going to be happy damit.  I did it. I got all those things done. Some of them I did actually enjoy. Some of them I forced myself to do while I was cursing my dead husband under my breath. ...

Tomorrow is Dan's Birthday. I guess in a couple hours, though I don't know what time he was born. I wanna say the middle of the day, but that doesn't really sound like Dan, it's not very exciting. Baby Girl, who if you haven't heard is exactly like her father, was born at exactly 5am.  On a Thursday.  Back then Wednesdays were awful days for Dan. He got up early and went to school, then he went to his internship, then he went to work.  He was gone about 13 hours every Wednesday. He said "Whatever you do Jennifer please don't go into labor on a Wednesday night." Well it wasn't my idea, it was Baby Girls. Anyway I imagine his birth more like that. I will ask his mother when I see her.  39. He died six weeks after he turned 36.  Three years, almost. not quite. This is his third birthday without him.  We are all going out to dinner, my family, his family, I'm thinking about bringing him along, that will definitely get some crazy widow looks.  ...

"Hey Dad are you busy? I need you to be a witness to signing my will. You know, then it will be ok if I die prematurely."   "Jennifer"  thats his way of saying he's not amused, calling me by my full name. he drags it out "Jennnnnnnniiiifffffeeeeerrrrrrrrrrrrrr" He doesn't always appreciate the young widow humor.  Like he doesn't want his daughter to die. He didn't want his son in law to die either (he was after all his favorite son in law) but look what happened there. I finally got around to writing a will. It doesn't say much, please don't pawn our wedding rings. My sister gets custody of Baby Girl.  Baby Girl of course is why I wrote it.  It has been on my to do list ever since Dan died.  "Holy crap what if something happens to me? What if there's a car accident?what if I get cancer? What if I just up and die out of nowhere? Who will take care of Baby Girl?"  In a way it's a ridiculous question, I can think of...

Baby Girl and I put up our Christmas tree today.  I didn't really feel like it, I didn't really want to, but I did it anyway.  That's what we do Thanksgiving weekend, we put up our tree.  Dan always said it was too early, that we should at least wait until December 1st. I always gave him a silly look and said something like "don't be ridiculous, we want Christmas up as long as possible" I always wanted Christmas up as long as possible. To enjoy it as long as possible, to love it as long as possible. I love Christmas, thats who I am. Correction, thats who I was. I don't love Christmas anymore, or the holiday season.  I want to love it still, I remember how much I loved it and I want to be back there, where everything was magical and getting presents was so much fun (Dan was awesome at buying presents). Now a huge part of me just wants it to be over. I just want to sleep through the whole thing.  Go to sleep in November and wake up in February. Maybe i...

I remember what I was doing at this time three years ago. Ok maybe not down to the minute but it was the Monday night before Thanksgiving 2014. I wasn't making pies, or cleaning my house, I wasn't double checking what I had gotten at the store earlier that day to make sure I had everything I needed.  I was sitting in a chair next to the hospital bed in the ER. I had just watched my husband have the biggest siezure I have ever seen in my life. I guess really it all started the night before that. He had a siezure while we were sleeping, it woke me up. It was a "typical" one for him, although typical is a strange word because this was only about the fourth one he had had in our fifteen year marriage. Typical: uh how to describe them, even typical ones are scary, but I have seen worse, the one he had before that which was at least seven years before this because Baby Girl wasn't even born, he bit through part of his tongue.  Honestly it was very similar to the one t...

My husband Dan is what one would call an intellectual. He was NOT what one would call a handy man.  If you knew him at all you are laughing right now because you know how truly right I am. I say was and knew because hes dead. He's been dead ever since I started blogging. I started blogging because he was dead. I wonder what Dan would think of my blogs? I wouldn't call myself a handy woman because most of the time I just pretend I know what I'm doing, but I do like doing house projects and compared to Dan I might as well be Tim Allen.  I was talking to my friend the other day, sobbing because I was missing Dan, I think she was maybe trying to cheer me up because she said "you know what he wasn't as great as you remember, you are seeing everything through rose colored glasses. I remember one time you wanted his help packing up a garage sale you had just had and he was working on some random project in the back yard and you were super annoyed that he was working on ...

You know what popped up on my facebook memories today.  The blog post I wrote 1 year.  In it I describe everything that happened the night Dan died. I wrote about him dying. I decided not to reshare that one today.  I don't know if I would have written that out now, or rather I probably would have written it just not shared it with the whole entire world.  Apearently one of the side effects of grief is that your tack flies completly out the window. I noticed it withen a day of Dan being dead, I was totally tackless and guess what? I didn't fucking give a dam.  I also started swearing, a lot. I remeber when I was in labor with Baby Girl. To say it was painful was a huge understatement, only one thing has ever been worse and I bet you can guess correctly that that would be Dan dying. Anyway I remeber being in labor and squeezing Dans hand so tight his knuckles were turnig red. The nurse said "It's ok honey you can cuss up a storm in here if you need to, everyone...

I went to therapy the other day.  I know I haven't written about therapy in a while.  Never fear my crazy widow brain is alive and well, thus I still go to therapy. Just haven't gotten around to writing about it. Actually I haven't had the heart to write about it.  Therapy has been rough the last couple of weeks and honestly I've mostly cried through the whole thing.  My heart has been so heavy lately and It makes me mad. Mad at myself because "I've been doing so well" yup those words came out of my own mouth, I really felt good this summer. Like I was finally kicking some widow ass. Now I feel like I'm back to just barely keeping my head above water and that makes me mad. Mad at Dan for having the nerve to still be dead after all this time. I mean what is his problem anyway, all he has to do is just stop being dead and everything would be fine again. Simple right? I am a planner, I like to have a plan I like to know whats going on. Maybe thats why I...

Sometimes I think they don't remember. Or they don't want to remember. They want to pretend that everything is fine. They want me to be fine. They want Baby Girl to be fine. Fine fine fine everything is fine.  Two years and ten months tomorrow, shouldn't everything be fine by now? My friends husband is out of town. She said she went to sleep early last night because there was no point in staying up without her husband to hang out with.  Yup thats exactly right, there's no point in staying up. There is also no point in going to sleep without your husband to sleep next to. There's not a lot of point to most stuff now a days. It's November, I'm feeling it. November is weighing me down already. The start of the holiday season. I love the holidays. family, food, presents, Christmas, lights, cozy blankets. I love it all. I used to love it all. I want to love it all again. I want to be happy again. It's harder then it sounds.  Every month has a  "thi...

I sleep with a sound machine.  It has seven different sounds but I always leave it on 'ocean waves'  I got it shortly after Dan died, to drowned out the noises I didn't want to hear, to make the house not so eerily quite. To create noise where there no longer was any, Dan snored like a chimney and the last couple years had a c pap machine, noises that were now gone. To try and distract my brain long enough to fall asleep. It helped I think.  We were out of town last week (in Disneyland, but I'll blog about that later) I didn't take the sound machine with us. I figured we would be exhausted enough from the excitement of our day that we would fall asleep immediately. I was right and we easily fell asleep every night. When we got home we had a couple more nights of pure exhaustion, after all Disneyland wears you out. Last night I went to turn the sound machine on and Baby Girl said "O mommy do we have to turn it on, can't we just leave it off?"  Uh ok, ...