Carry on Castle: Living with Grief

I was one month old when Mt. St Helens erupted. I don’t remember it any other way. But my parents do. My parents have a jar of ash they collected off their car the next day. They lived about 2 and a half hours away and they could see the explosion from their yard. All growing up we had pictures of the mountain exploding lining our hallways. A tribute to an extraordinary event. It is one of those days you talk about what you were doing the moment it happened because you remember. I don’t remember, I was too young. Baby girl was seven when her daddy died. When her life exploded. It’s older then a month but my biggest fear is that it is not old enough to remember what it was like before. That she will say I don’t remember what life looked like before. We have an urn of ashes. Our halls are lined with pictures of the life before. A tribute to an extraordinary event. Will they mean anything to her? Or will she just listen to me talk about it. A life she doesn’t remember because she was...

We spent Thanksgiving with family as most people do. Wednesday night we had thanksgiving with my family. Thursday we had Thanksgiving with Dans family. This has been our tradition for many years now. Last year at both family gatherings I spent time in the bathroom crying. This year I didn't do that. An outsider might say that that makes this Thanksgiving better then the last. That's not necessarily true. Not better, just different, perhaps better at controlling crying. In truth we really had a wonderful thanksgiving with both families. As always there was the weird non presence of Dan. It didn't belong at thanksgiving, Dan belonged at thanksgiving not his missing hole. However it is always good to be with family. Baby girl especially had a great time. She was surrounded by one of her favorite people groups: UNCLES. Baby girl loves her uncles, they kinda love her too. She spent two days of being picked up and spun around and tickled and chased and and pulled through the ...

I look in the mirror and I feel tired. I look tired too but I emanate a feeling of constant tired. Like an aura surrounding me. An aura of tiredness. That’s all that’s left. The joy is gone. The light in my eyes is gone. That “red headed spark” I was known to have has vanished. My magic is gone. All that’s left is tired. I get up every morning and my mother in law asks if I slept well because I look so tired. I slept as well as I always do now, which isn’t well at all. I’m just always tired. I see my friends and they say I look tired, that I’m working too hard. Yes, I’m working twice as hard now, no ten times as hard, you have to account for the grief not just simply the missing person. I go to therapy and she tells me I look tired, she tells me to practice self care, I try, I’m still tired. No amount of rest, or sleep, or fancy massages is going to cure my tiredness. I see lines on my face, my cheeks are hollow, even though I’ve lost no physical weight. It’s just sank off my cheeks...

Baby girl and I both had bad days. Nothing drastic, I was just having a very sad missing my husband day and baby girl didn't have a good time at her play date. Part of me thinks it was for the same reason I was having a sad day. That she knows even though she doesn't know. Part of me thinks being 9 just sucks. Exactly two years ago today is when my life started to change. I didn't realize it then, I was oblivious to it in fact. I had no clue that in 6 short weeks my soul mate would die in an instant. The thought never crossed my mind. Two years ago today Dan had a few seizures, The doctors switched his medication. Six weeks later he died of a siezure. Like most of them it started in the middle of the night. The Sunday before Thanksgiving 2014. We were asleep and I woke up to the bed shaking. Dan had had a siezure. It was so short by the time I turned the light on and sat up it was over. He rolled over and started snoring. I shook his arm and he tried to shove me away. H...

So I have this house I bought in September. It needs a lot of fixing, so I'm fixing it before we move in. It is extremely frustrating. It turns out I can't do as much of it by myself as I thought I could. Frustrating. The stuff I can do by myself isn't very much fun by myself. Frustrating. Like my whole entire life now, everything is without Dan. I am trying to make a home without Dan. FRUSTRATING. I am one of the lucky ones. I have an amazing support system of family and friends who want to help me. I know a lot of people don't have that.  I even have some that are quite skilled in house remodel. The problem is they all have lives. They have families. They have jobs. They have better things to do then fix my house even though they do want to help me. It's ok. I get it. Dan was the type of person who didn't let his job go away after he got home. He had the type of job that couldn't go away when he got home. Dan was in charge of a facility for mentall...

I never really loved cooking. I never really minded it, but I didn't love it. It was just what you did to get food. If you did it good the food then tasted good. Win Win. I did love baking, because that food always tasted good. I would say I'm an average cook. I can make some things really really well and I make some things really really bad. Spending hours every day preparing food was never really my thing. Dan was an ok cook. He could cook and did often but he liked to experiment with food. He liked to put weird combinations together and see how they came out. If they came out good, then great we would eat it. If it came out bad he would eat it anyway because he was one of those guys that would eat anything. I would eat a bowl of cereal. So I never loved night when he experimented because you never knew what you were gonna get. (some people might say that one of the few things baby girl gets from me is that hating change stuff. But that is another story) As I've said a ...

I never in my wildest crazy weird alternate dimension dreams imagined this would be me. First of all as I've said a million times, this was never supposed to happen. This isn't my life. I am not a single parent. I am not a 36 year old widow. Dan and I were forever, we always knew we would be together forever. We talked about dying but it was always when we were done with life, 95 or 100. We would cash in our life insurance and go on a crazy adventure. We would die together, flying an airplane, or going bungee jumping or swimming with sharks. Whatever it was it would be big and it would be together. Second, I still hold that I am not a writer. Dan was the writer in this family. Dan was an amazing writer. If you don't believe me there are links to his writing in the upper right of this page, read them and then you will understand what I mean. Yet here I am being a single mother. Here I am being a 36 year old widow. As much as I don't want to be here, here I am. In a ...