Carry on Castle: Living with Grief

It was a given that Dan and I would take care of his parents when they got older. He was the youngest and his mother’s only biological son. We knew his mom would outlive his dad by quite a few years, and we would be there for her after that. This was the plan before we got married, and I was fine with it. I loved his parents. It was an unspoken oath, but everyone knew about it.   Dan’s mom, Pat, lived in a world of boys. She had a husband, five stepsons, and Dan. She was ecstatic to have another girl around the house. Finally she had someone around who could talk about something other than cars and computers. The first Valentine’s Day after Dan and I started dating, Pat got me a stuffed kitten, just because she could. Those stinky boys didn't want stuffed animals anymore.   When Dan and I got married, I brought my wedding dress (which was my mother’s) over to Pat’s house to try on. After she oooed and aahed, I said, “Now I just need to find a veil!”   “I still have my vei...

I think my daughter is getting to the point where she might be aware that I blog about her.  There may be a day in the near future (if it hasn't happened already) where she will see my blogs on the internet. That will be a fun conversation. She's growing up so fast I don't even call her Baby Girl anymore because shes not one, no matter how much I want her to be. She's 14 and a freshman in high school. I should really come up with a new name for her. Her therapist and other smart grief people have told me many times that children will grieve at every developmental stage. Every time their brain grows, they will think about death differently and grieve accordingly. I don't think her brain has been growing lately. Her dad died when she was in second grade, I don't even remember that year and I don't think she does either. There was a point in my life where I didn't think she was gonna make it through 4th grade. That year was full of panic attacks and rage fo...

Annual Stults Family BBQ 2013 For years after Dan died I hated the 12 of every month. Dan died on the 12th of January. Every time the 12th rolled around it was going to be an awful day. It marked another month that Dan was gone from this world. I planned very little for the 12 of each month and if possible nothing at all so I could hide in my hole, because it was an awful day. I knew it would be, I was expecting it. I run away to the beach every 12th of January because nothing good can come on that Day. Everyone knows holidays are hard we expect them to be. We miss our loved ones on the holidays. It's a given. I've learned that my birthdays and Mothers day are gonna be a wash for me. My kid gets weird on those days, just weird, something about holidays for her mommy trigger her grief for her daddy. I haven't figured out why yet but I have definitely experienced it. Those special days fort me honestly suck and thats just the way it is now. It's no fun going out to dinner...

                                                                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...

 My boyfriend Justin and I were driving the other day. A song he liked came on the radio so he turned it up. I told him I loved this song too, so he turned it up even loader. A seconded later we had all the windows down and the music up as far as it would go, singing with it at the top of our lungs like we were some crazy teenagers. Dancing with it as much as we could in a car.  After a couple songs we turned it back down and became grown ups again.  "That was fun" I said. "I haven't done anything like that in forever" "really" he looked puzzled. "You don't turn the music in the house up really loud and dance around with your kid."  "No we don't do that. She doesn't like loud things." I replied. Still in disbelief he said "My kids love dancing around the house to loud music. I pick them up and spin them and play them like their air guitars" "Ya we don't do stuff like that" I thought about it. We u...

I'm trying to enter this writing contest and I'm having trouble figuring out what to write about. Grief naturally, but their is just so much to choose from.  So I decided to go with a overview of my grief life. Classic outline, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. The beginning is pretty self explanatory; my husband died, thus begins my life of grief. Of course I told more details about my husband dying. You can read about that here if you want but I warn you it will break your heart. The end is decently easy to write cause I'm here, now, six years later, and believe it or not I'm ok. You can read about that here . The middle though, the middle is always the tricky part. I don't really remember the middle, I remember it was unbearably sucky, I remember it was hard to breathe, I remember everything took all my energy. It hurt, worse then anything has ever hurt before. We did stuff in the middle of it, we moved twice, we went to therapy a lot. Specifics were not c...

 I woke up this morning and went to get a cup of coffee. I reached up into the cupboard where the coffee lives and all this brown grainy stuff fell down. Someone had neglected to close the bag of mocha mix. I choose to blame my now coffee drinking teenager, though I suppose it might have been me. There was mocha mix all over the cupboard shelf.   So while I mumbled under my breath that I was going to send the teenager to live with her father, I proceeded to pull everything out of the cupboard so I could clean it. There was an actual bag of coffee, no idea how old that is since I've used pods for years. A bag of loose leaf tea that seemed to have fallen under the same fate as the mocha mix. A mason jar half full of bits of flowers and herbs. Awwwwww my Stacie tea. Dan died in the middle of the night. Extremely suddenly and unexpectedly is my go to phrase. Just dead, just gone, just like that. By the next morning my house was full of people. I didn't know what to do so I di...

Just go with the flow. Dear Lord if there was any skill I wish I could teach my daughter it would be to just go with the flow. Yes it’s not what we planned, yes I know its not what you want, but it is reality so just go with the flow and make the best of it. Right now, we are in the middle of a severe winter storm. That picture is of my back yard. It’s not snow, its ice, because it does not snow here, it ices. There is at least an inch of ice on everything, in most places it is more like three inches. There is no power, no hot water, no internet, no cell service. I am sitting in my cold dark house under a pile of blankets using up my computer battery to write, which I will have to post later. My 13-year-old daughter is in the bathroom taking a shower, a cold shower, in a cold house. I can hear her crying from the living room, because shes cold and miserable and wants power and hot water and internet. One mile down the road is my boyfriend Justin’s house. He has a generator, which...

  I certainly didn't want to hear it. Really I still don't want to hear it, the thought of it makes me want to puke, saying it out loud is nearly impossible. Writing it out in a blog: well can't you tell I'm stalling.  Lets stall some more. On January 12, 2015 at 12:46 am, my husband was pronounced dead on my living room floor. He had just turned 36, I was 34. At the end of the hall our 7 year old daughter was sleeping in her cozy bed surrounded by stuffed animals. We were high school sweethearts and had been married for 15 years, we were still madly in love with each other, we couldn't wait to have more babies: We were living our fairy tale. And he just died, out of nowhere. Our lives were over but I was still breathing.   I'll be flat out honest, I wanted to die. More I wanted to be with Dan and the only way that could happen was by me dying. I didn't have that choice though; I woke my snuggly baby girl up in the middle of the night and told her daddy was ...