Carry on Castle: Living with Grief

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, ...