a grief ramble




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  "thing" or several 'National _________ awareness month.'   November is National adoption month.  In case you don't know Dan and I were in the middle of adopting a baby when he died.  We had been working on our adoption for four years and every November I would try and encourage us by saying "It's National adoption month, what better month to get our baby, surely it will happen this month." But it never did, until it was too late. We got the call that there was a baby waiting for us twelve hours after Dan died. We didn't adopt that baby, it was too late.  This is a side story and not really what this blog is about so I am going to move on now but National adoption month still gets to me so I wanted to mention it.

November is also 'National Epilepsy month' I didn't know that until just this year when a friend was talking about it.  Ironic isn't it. The growth our our family and the death of our family represented in the same month.  We never really said Dan had Epilepsy because it didn't feel like he did. He just had a siezure every couple years that he took some medication for. That was it. No big deal, certainly nothing like dying to be concerned about. My friends daughter has epilepsy, she has seizures daily, often more then once a day. It is a very hard disease to deal with. Dan's wasn't like that. Dan averaged a siezure once every five years. For real, thats all.  That's not really epilepsy or at least it doesn't feel like it. It really didn't affect most of our lives.

I am part of several online grief groups, one of them is specifically for people who have lost a loved one from a siezure. I didn't even know there was such a thing, I was under the impression you couldn't die from a siezure.  Ok I knew it was possible but really the chances of dying from a siezure were less then our chances of winning the lottery. I guess I should have bought a lottery ticket that day.  In this grief group, people had seizures all the time. Everyday. the survivors can get into great detail about the seizures and describing them and what made the last one different from the other ones.  Honestly I don't visit that group often because I can't take it. It brings me straight back to the PTSD I have from the night Dan died.

November is also the beginning of the end for in a way for me.  It was November, the week of Thanksgiving to be exact, that Dan had a small series of seizures causing us to go to the ER. It was in the ER that I watched him have the biggest siezure he had ever had, but we were in the ER, doctors and medicine were everywhere, so more or less he was fine.  Dan was actually annoyed that they made him stay overnight for observation.  It was in the ER that they gave him a different medication and told him he couldn't drive for three months. We went home and watched tv. Baby Girl was at grandmas and we could watch grown up tv. (I think we caught up on Walking Dead, or maybe Vampire diaries) It was like a date.  That was all it was, no worries, we were fine. We didn't know we only had a few weeks left we didn't know.

December is Dan's birthday and of course Christmas. December was always such a great month and now it will never be the same.  Dan died on January 12. That's all, just dead, just gone. Friends used to tell me it looked like my house puked Christmas we had so many decorations. I don't wanna puke Christmas anymore. I volunteer a lot at Baby Girls school. They wanted me to do something in December and I said "Nope, I reserve the right to check out for December and January"  They all know why, they all said the understood. I think I should have added November to the list.

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

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