The future is black






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 fit in so well with Dan's family they are all planners (ok they take planning to the extreme even for me), except Dan. Dan was so not a planner, like ever. At this moment I can only think of one thing he planned out completely, the date we went on the night he asked me to marry him. That's one of the things that worked so great about us, I could plan us a trip to the beach and he would throw in something spontaneous to do there like get Tattoos. It was the best of both worlds, I didn't have to sleep in the car because he didn't find a hotel room and I got a shiney new tattoo.

For my personality style it is one of the things I hate most about this whole dead husband thing.  It wasn't in my plan, and now I don't have a plan. "I wish someone would just tell what to do and I'll do it" I have told my therapist on more then one occasion. Just tell me what the plan is, just let me know. She won't tell me, she says I have to figure it out on my own. ugggg, lame, stupid, I don't know how. Three years ago I had a plan.

Two years and 10 months ago I had a plan. Until the moment Dan died I had a plan. I knew what was going to happen, The paramedics would help Dan wake up and then they would insist they take him to the hospital. He would try to argue that he was fine and didn't need to go and was going on a trip for work in the morning. I would tell him he was going to the hospital and give him a 'don't even try to mess with your wife look'  The next day in the hospital he would hassle me about how this was ridiculous and he was fine and he couldn't believe I called 911, there was nothing wrong with him. They could have been out there saving people who actually needed it instead of wasting there time on him because he was fine.  I would have rolled my eyes at him about a thousand times that day.  That was a good plan. What actually happened, actually dying that was a bad plan, I'm gonna go ahead and say it was the worst plan ever.

Thus I am in therapy telling my counselor that I don't know what to do, I don't know the plan. She tells me I don't have to know. Ya but uggggggg.  But this is the problem I tell her,  "Always, always when I looked into the future I could see Dan and I. Old, wrinkled, sitting on our porch holding hands (his hands still felt the same around mine even though it was old and wrinkled). The sun was setting and we were watching our grandkids play in the yard. They looked so happy, we smiled at each other and said 'ya we made that'  I always thought it was a pretty good plan.  Now when I look to the future that isn't there, nothing is there, it's just black, empty, nothing. And that is scary as hell.

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

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

PTSD is not for sissys

Image
Do you know what PTSD is? Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I bet you think you do.  You might say something like "ya its what people that go off to war have" true. You might say "It's when people see really terrible things" true. A few really smart people might say "ya my friend watched her beloved husband die and now she has it" very true. If you are a mental health professional you might say "ya a child who all of a sudden has a dad who dies will have it" also true.  I was telling a friend once about how life is now without Dan and she said "wow it's almost like you have PTSD or something." No not almost, we do. But what exactly is it? Well it's complicated. I can't describe it for baby girl because I am not in her mind (unfortunately) but I can try and describe it for me. I am hesitant to do so; it's not an easy thing to talk about, But if we are going on a the point of this blog is to be therapeutic for me and h
Read more

The Floor

Image
I pulled him off of our bed and onto the floor. The 911 dispatcher told me to. She said it would help him breathe. I grabbed his ankles and pulled hard on his legs. He fell to the floor with a loud thump. I gasped at the loudness of it, but he didn’t move on his own at all. He didn't shake his head and say, “Ow, what’d you pull me off the bed for?” He didn't do anything. He just laid there. She told me to lift his neck up to help him breathe. I tried, but it was hard to move him, and I didn't want to hurt him.  I put my head on his chest again and again, I couldn’t tell if he was breathing, I couldn’t tell if that was his heartbeat or mine that I heard as he laid on the floor.  “Daddy! Wrestle with me!” she would shout, as she jumped into him and they landed on the floor. It was their favorite game. She would pound him and he would exaggerate the impact, clutching his stomach and lifting his legs in the air.  “You got me good, baby girl!” he would tell her. She would grin i
Read more

Milestones in grief

Image
                                                                Dan and I around 2011 I wrote this for a writing contest about milestones. Writing about every grief milestone would take a book and I had a word limit so I couldn't do that. I tried to do the really big ones. I have not had a particularly eventful life. When I was eight, my parents moved, but they took me with them. At ten, I had a pretty bad accident, but I came out of it fine. My husband and I met at sixteen, and at nineteen, we went against all good advice and got married. I gave birth to our daughter when I was 27.   I loved our boring, normal life. We were living our happily ever after. I was a stay at home mom, Dan was finishing up grad school. Everyone says this kind of thing at funerals, but Dan really was the most amazing person I’ve ever met in my life. He wanted to save the world: the people, the animals, the ecosystem. He wanted to make the world better, and he was. I loved our little family and couldn
Read more