Carry on Castle: Living with Grief

                                                        Because I wanna do this now       Before Dan and I got married we took a premarital counseling class. I'm not really sure why, other then the small college we went to was really big on it. I remember exactly one thing from that class. In it we took the Myers Briggs personality test. It assigns letters to your personality and then those letters represent a characteristic or trait you have.  You get four letters, If I thought long and hard I could remember what all four of Dan's and mine  were but I don't wanna think that hard. What I do remember, what I have never forgotten from this class we took 22 years ago is that Dan was a P and I was a J. I don't remember what those letters stand for but I remember what they mean. A J is a doer, a J gets shit done. A J gets...

I meet a new widow friend the other day. She had the shitty luck of recently joining our club.  She mentioned how she had tried to go grocery shopping and had a panic attack, "totally didn't see that coming" she said. I commiserated with her "ya it happens."  Us widows talk about it all the time. I've even written a blog about it, you can read it HERE  if you want. So that got me to thinking about things that people don't know happens in this awesome new life of widowhood and I decided to make a list for all of you who are lucky enough to have no idea this was a thing and for all of you who are new in the club so when it does happen to you you can say o ya thats normal. This is a real list,  this isn't a ten things you didn't know but you actually did already know because you've heard it somewhere or other. This isn't grief comes in waves and you will always love them no matter what kinda stuff. This is the down and dirty, we have to...

I bought tickets to the play "Dear Evan Hansen" a few months ago, I had heard great things about it and was really excited to go. "Whats it about?" someone asked "Well its about this kid that commits suicide and how his friends deal with it" I know sounds fantastic right. But if I've done anything in the last five years it's been embrace everything grief related, so I was excited to see Dear Evan Hansen. When I originally bought the tickets I asked Baby Girl if she wanted to come along she said "Nope looks boring, whats it even about?" She wasn't enthralled by the explanation I had, so I didn't get her a ticket. My mother in law went with some of her friends a few days before me. She called me after seeing it. "Jennifer every single high school and middle school child in America needs to see this play" "It was that good huh" "Yes it is that good" My boyfriend Justin and I went to the play....

The summer after Dan died we were at our annual beach trip with his family. It was fathers day weekend and we were going to spread some of his ashes while we were there. I remember very little about that trip. I remember walking along the beach with my sandals dangling from my hand, so many tears in my eyes I could barley see the ocean, screaming and yelling at Dan and God, both equally. I still don't know who I'm madder at. I remember one conversation I had with my sister in law, she said "So what are you doing there?" I thought it was pretty obvious but ok I'll tell her. "Coloring" I was coloring in one of those adult coloring books, I had been coloring in it all week, pretty non stop. "Well duh I can see your coloring, what I meant was I've never seen you do that before, I was wondering if it was something your therapist had told you to do or something." O I get it, Jenny's going crazy so she needs something to calm her mind down w...

So I did this thing once. I wrote a book. I’ve never considered myself a writer and I still don’t, not really. Nevertheless I wrote a book. I wrote it because I couldn’t not write it. It was just something I had to do. I don’t think I could have stopped myself if I tried.  My husband Dan was the writer, he wrote beautifully and eloquently. I remember I used to write things like our Christmas letters because I had the time. In them I would say something like "we went to Crater Lake this summer it was cool" then I would give it to Dan to edit and he would turn that into a whole paragraph about the beauty and majesty of God’s creation and the love of our family. I said it was cool, that was the extent of my writing.  Then he died. Out of no where in the middle of the night he died. My soulmate, my true love, the man I was happily going spend the next 70 years with was gone. My life as over at 34. I didn’t know what to do. I did know I needed therapy, lots and lots of thera...

One of Dan's and mine favorite T.V. shows was Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In the show is a character named Faith. Faith is a complicated character, she had a hard life, she's never sure if she's on the good side or the bad side, she kills a lot of demons. Faith is also terrible at showing emotions.  I think sh'e learned to hide them from the world because she learned that the world doesn't really care.The only thing Faith really knows about herself is that she's 5x5. When asked 'how's it going Faith?' she replies, "5x5." When asked if she's ok after having the crap beat out of her by a monster she replies "5x5." Faith is always 5x5. Everything is always 5x5. No one knows what that means. They talk about it several times in the show "What does 5x5 even mean?" I don't think Joss Weadon the creator of the show ever gives us an answer.  I took it to mean 'fine' like when someone asks you how your day is y...