I have not written in a long, long time. Mostly due to being very inundated with new clients and new things to learn. Sounds good and it mostly is, but the truth is this experience of watching my life partner slip away has left me with lots of vulnerability and anxiety. I feel like I'm 5 years old living in this adult world. I really just want my Mommy but instead, I put on a blazer and pretend that I know how to fix your website or get you more Facebook followers, create a promotional video for your business etc.
This multi-tasking of skills can be fun, but it leaves me spread thin across industries sometimes and not knowing where to focus my knowledge. There have been many late nights and early mornings working on something new and I'm slightly uncertain about the way I'm going about it. That has created a lot of anxiety for me as business amps up. I'm physically and emotionally exhausted still and frankly, tired of grief.
The other reason that I haven't written is that every day, I go through such a cycle of emotions that I think about sharing but I don't even know where to start, so even in blogging, I feel overwhelmed.
I heard the holidays can be hard and so this is where I am. I am flooded with remembrances of goodbyes. Last year at this time, people were beginning to say their goodbyes to Larry. I remember one dinner with a local couple. I knew it would be our last together. Larry picked the restaurant. The place was crowded and the food mediocre and I wanted it to be special and it just wasn't. I wanted that whole holiday season to be special and that was very much an impossible fantasy. I remember I purchased the softest lounging clothes I could possibly get for Larry as Christmas gifts. So very strange to have to buy things relating to his illness and side effects of chemo and such a stark contrast to other holidays. There was a bamboo tshirt that I purchased last Christmas which was very soft. Several months later, the hospice nurse and I cut the tshirt down the back so that we could just slip it over his head because it was becoming harder for all parties to roll or lift Larry. It pains me that we cut the t-shirt. Not only because it was expensive, but it symbolized how transient everything we were purchasing was. After Larry died, I had to decide if the shirt would become a rag for the house or to throw it away. It seems like such as small decision but this is where grief trips us all. Because it was such a loving act on my part, because we dressed him in that t-shirt a lot, throwing it away felt like throwing Larry away and my love for him, keeping it as a rag felt like saying his life wasn't worth much and a constant reminder of his death. I opted to throw it away.
Before I leave you on this completely bleak note, I have been reaching out for help and lots of people have been spending time with me.
I've always believed that when you drop a stone in a pond, the resulting waves continue the reverberate forever..they just soon become so dispersed that we can not see them anymore. Our eyes are always drawn to the sight of the next stone dropping into the pond, but the waves of stones dropped long ago are still affecting things as much as they always have. It's like that with people too. My father's life still affects me in ways that I am not even aware of. He has changed the way that I see everything even after his death 14 years ago. I'm just not able to point out how anymore. Today I almost never think about a physical possession as having belonged to my father. When I see things that he worked on, or things that I have that belonged to him...I consider them to be mine. After all this time...when I do ponder something that belonged to my father, it always feels good..a connection to the real live person that I knew. For me...I don't really know if anyone will ponder about my memory after I am gone, but I do know that "good or bad" I have changed the pond forever.
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