It’s been a year since she fell asleep for good. It’s been a year of numbness. A year of overwhelming emotions including emptiness, confusion, anger, deep sadness and general feeling lost without her. It’s only been a year, but it feels like more.
How can I go from doing life for four to life for two without the sadness of what’s now missing? A whole human being that loved, felt pain, influenced so many around her is now no longer here to be apart of our evolution.
Now I live a life of quiet solitude and repetition. Repeating the numbness of having lost a vital piece of my day to day. The numbness of our sins now living without their mother. Waking to aimlessness once my responsibility with our second son is completed for the morning.
There are complications of feeling useful while wading through this new way of life as a widower. It has been extremely overwhelming at times. So much so that most of the time I struggle to find where to go next, or what to do next.
It’s been a year of being hollowed out. Waking up daily to a life of rebuilding has been exhausting. Sleeping over to two houses a night has been exhausting. But, I have no other plans right now on how to overcome these moments of despair. Wrestling moment by moment with what the calling on my life now is is exhausting.
There’s a constant struggle with purpose I was not prepared to face. I haven’t come across anyone who can make sense of dealing with death so close and personal. There are resources that have helped with the facts of life without my person, but it hasn’t made navigating the father any easier.
I’m not only living in without my bride. I’m living on without the plans we had. I’m struggling to find meaning in life without her. I still have the things we started together, but there is now a vacancy in enjoying the things that remain.
Even writing about my struggle seems arbitrary in that we are all going to die. If anything, having lost my better half has put a cloud over hope.
The reason I called this one Complications in Grieving is because there is a level of expressing the pain of loss that is clean. Positive. But, that level seems inadequate. To, “be strong” for anyone seems incomplete. Like crying in front of my children is some how inappropriate.
I can’t be strong for anyone but myself, and I can’t seem to discover the energy to be strong for me. It’s almost as if I am at the precipice of a black hole, or am I already sucked in. Drowning.
There’s gotta be time and space to feel the absence. At this stage of processing, it feels like a recurring nightmare from which I am unable to awake.