Carry on Castle: Living with Grief

                                                                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

 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