Gwenivere

I feel like the odd woman out. My house is clean. Too clean actually. I keep doing the chores because that is what I always did. It's mostly to kill the many extra hours I have now. There isn't much reward because the house doesn't feel really lived in anymore. It's sad to change our bed now. There is a whole side that is never used. I think of the times I would hassle Steve. about how quickly he could undo what I did. I always liked our balance as he managed the tech stuff and outside projects. I miss the partnership. We all know how we lived has so drastically changed. Cooking is the worst. Sitting alone. There doesn't seem to be any thing the grief doesn't affect. Even our dogs are caught in this. They often get cheated because I am crying and can only manage the basics. Fortunately they are forgiving beings. They even seem to get it and have been more in need of being close to me. I'd give anything to wake up to the life we had.

Kristine, I start every day not wanting to wake up. I always do too early and lie there thinking of another day without Steve. How will I do it again? What is the point? Etc. I do get up, but the day is like being in a colorless world. I see things that used to make me smile and sometimes do (that is a major improvement), but they fade quickly. We can become so isolated by the grief. I do hope you will find a way to get out like you want. I push myself so I make some contact with the world. It may not have much meaning many times, but grief distorts our perspective, even to the point of knowing how we really feel. I'm no expert, just another trying to navigate thru the darkness. Every journey is unique, but I do hear the suffering in your words. I have dogs too and while I haven't much to give them right now, I use that as a starting point for my day.

Brad, l read your posts and can so relate to the wandering and feeling lost. My day is always influenced by how deeply the grief hits me. I have some activity days that help, but the ones I am on my own are the worst. Getting up is a major achievement. Then it is spending all that time waiting to go back to sleep knowing this will just start all over again. Nights are like you described. I wander aimlessly forgetting if I did something or finding I did and don't remember doing it. I used to love walking, but since grief hurts your body as much as your heart, it has ramped up my arthritis that is robbing me if the amount I would like to do. I'm glad you have that as I know how it helps. I think about all things that happen in a day I used to share with Steve talking. Little things that mean nothing really, just shared time together observing and experiencing life together. So many times I want to tell him something and the emptiness is amplified because I can't. I am on medication too for anxiety attacks and while I am grateful for it, it angers/saddens me that I need that to survive this dark void. Sobbing and yelling can hit me with no warning. The triggers are impossible to prepare for so many times. I get calls asking for him and have to say he is dead. All the legalities are done which is mixed. I hated doing them, but now I am officially alone. Steve made me promise to apply for survivor benefits from SS and I found that ironic as that is last way I would describe myself at this time. Or maybe not. I survive. I used to live. I wish you the best on your journey through this.

I so get the cooking thing. Occasionally I will cook, but I am so tired of sitting at the table alone. I tried once taking up his placemat and it so bothered me it is still there. Talk about the changes that are constant reminders. I lost a lot if weight the last year and I can't enjoy the fun ways to gain it back. Eating is just another daily task. No pleasure there. I know that they wanted us to live 'happy', contented and safe lives. What your Andre and my Steve didn't take into account is they were the ones that made that happen. How do you make the recipe when missing a vital ingredient?

Oops, darned tablet likes to change words on me.....not fling....doing in above post. Another thing that is so strange is I clean like I used to but often there really is no urgency or even need. It's to fill time in a way I was used to. Shopping is so different too. So much less to buy as some were only things he liked. I've basically lost my job. And one I really loved.

I know that feeling. I wake up and sometimes the only purpose if the day is to make it to when I get to go to sleep again, although I know I will wake to the same pattern. Steve wanted me to have a good life too. Made sure I had what I needed. The hitch is without him, I have yet to think of a way to do that. I volunteer a couple of times a week and the dogs always like going for walks, but that does not do it anymore without him. My counsellor days I am fling a good job too. I really don't know what that means. If she means feeling the worst I have ever felt, well, I am doing that. Crying? That's another easy one. But meaning....that is the elusive part.

I can echo what you are feeling. I hit year 2 the end of this month. Everyone kept telling me the first was the hardest and I am finding that a myth. The first was not only the emotional pain, but practical matters too that supplied a buffer to the reality of the foreverness of this. Now that those are done it is just the emotions and they are crushing. The physical responses also intensify this as I have all you listed. Every day I wake up now I think....I can't do this again. We had 37 years and to have that just disappear IS indescribable. I find no meaning in anything right now. He is all around me in our home except the most important way. A year of no interaction is a very cold and dark place. The one thing I could really use us a hug from him because he was the only one that could make me feel better in the worst of times. Talk about ultimate irony.

I also had someone once suggest I might find someone else. I was just as shocked when I heard that. Getting the life insurance money was tremendously sad. In the year Steve has been gone I have replaced 1 chair and a DVD player. I've had lots of yard work done as that was neglected for years because of his illness. It's all hollow and emptying me also as I cannot share it with him. And the money? Take every dime back and please have him walk in the door. I feel if the situation were reversed, your dear Scott would be feeling the very same things and have no disappointment with you. He would be trying to make sense of a life without the love of his life. He would understand. Steve and I talked about this before he died and he felt the disappointment for leaving me. It's all so complicated in our hearts and minds.

Brad, those triggers you posted. It constantly amazes me how for a brief moment I think I actually may be OK. Then wham! The slightest thing or thought (my brain and I seem to be at war, it wanting to flood me with the bad stuff) can turn everything upside down. People and what they say to try and 'fix' (which many call help) are the worst. It is why I don't talk to many about Steve anymore. But no matter what, someone pops up and says something that can totally derail me. The thing I am finding is not to let them have that power. I've created lines I won't let people cross anymore. Fortunately no one has made me feel the need to defend myself, but if they tried, they would fail. We all did the best we could at the time. And one thing we don't need is to ever 2nd guess that. It's like back seat drivers. They think they know more, but in reality they cannot see what we do. We sit in the seat of our personal journey.

When reading your post, Brad, it so reminded me of advice I keep getting, mostly unsolicited by the well meaning folks that don't get saying nothing is preferable. Steve was in a care facility the last 2 weeks because I could tend to his needs anymore at home. Like that apartment you had, I hate passing the place because of obvious reasons. Our home is so terribly bittersweet. Often if feels like just a house without him. But I am surrounded by decades of work we did to make this our home. I thought that would give me some peace, and maybe it will someday, but right now it is a constant reminder of his loss. It's so quiet. I often find myself wanting to call out to him to come see something or help me. I miss him tracking me down to show me something. Most of all I miss the shared times of eating and talking about the little things that make up life. After dinner we would always gather in the living room with our dogs to watch a favorite show. I still watch them, but no one to discuss or laugh over them with. So I have gotten asked soooooo many times if I would consider selling our home. Like that would take ease the pain? Knowing someone else was living in it? That living in an unfamiliar place would alter the grief? But then, I can't count how many times it has been suggested I join a book club, take a class, go here or there, etc. Things I never wanted to do anyway. People want to 'fix, us for some reason. Yes, we are broken, but not in the way they understand.

I have the same questions you do, Harleyquinn. I always wonder if Steve is somehow aware of the intense grief I am going thru losing him. Does he hear me cry? See how this has brought me to my knees in indescribable pain? Will I ever see him again? I never believed in an after life. This experience has me questioning that because I cannot fathom the energy force he was being snuffed out like it never existed. I hear all this 'they are alive thru our memories'. Yeah yeah. I don't him to feel bad, he already felt that so intensely when he knew it was ending I just want him to know that the love I have for him is even more than I knew. Wifflesnook, I now keep much to myself when in the outside world. To them, a year or more is long enough. I can understand that because their lives move on. But when someone really want to know how I am doing, it feels like a gift. In essence, it still feels like it is Steve and I when I go thru the gut punches of a grief attack. Ironically, he is the only person who could truly comfort me.

Closure? Really? If I am expected to find closure after spending my adult life with the person that brought me to who I am today then I will surely fail. Closure is for disagreements, buying a house, forgiveness, etc. My life will be forever changed. In time I hope to rejoin the world, but for now I am watching from the outside like some kind of stranger on a strange planet. It looks familiar, but I'm so out place. I've lost my partner. There is nowhere I go and where I live that is devoid of his presence and energy. Aside from losing a child, I know this will be the biggest change I will ever face and it will be with me til I die. I accept that. I do not accept I will find the worlds definition of closure. Out 'there' people want us to move on. I don't know if it because they lose patience or we are a reminder of what can happen to them. I don't really care. I like scba's word better. Integration. There is no denial our loved one is gone, but my hope is to find a way to live with that and the void it creates....forever.

I have gone thru so many phases of anger in the last year. Anger at Steve for leaving me, anger about how the end was handled as he died in so much pain, anger at seeing other couples still together and a general rage at the universe for tearing us apart. I never felt guilt about the feelings because the pain is so deep. It was natural to feel cheated in so many ways. We had a life we were happy with that got invaded by a monstrous disease. Ironically, he advised a friend of his to have his prostate choked and he survived. I felt anger at that because Steve helped save him and the guy is a prick, in my opinion. I'm not feeling anger as much as the reality that no matter what I want, beg for or have that childlike wish that seems possible...I will never see, talk to or touch him again. I kinda of miss the anger because it energized me. Gave me focus on a villain. This intense mourning just drains me and is not something I can fight. It's so deeply personal and at times suffocating. It follows me everywhere. I used to be able to distract, even for a brief time. But not anymore. I live in our home we created so he is everywhere I turn. From the house itself to something as small as some Baco's still on the table because he liked them. So I am torn. I miss anger but it isn't something I can feel beyond....why us? Every couple will have to face this, but I feel this was too premature. Tho I am sure best 5 or 50 years the feeling is the same.

I was hit with a thought that our life with our partner is like a book. A novel that keeps adding pages and chapters over the years and thru the experiences that become our memories. I got very comfy in that book. Assumed it would just keep growing with new things however big or small, it was always there. But it ended. I've spent almost a year living without that book now. I have drafts of entries I would have made had I been able to share them with Steve. But I cannot so they pile up with no place to go. The last chapter is not a satisfying end. Unlike reading a book for real and hating it for it to end, there isn't another to replace it for another tale. There is a book I possess, but the pages are blank right now because it will be my book without him. I don't know how to start it yet. Posts I have written, email shared and talks I have had with people are the rough draft. I've never had to do this on my own before. Steve and I were each other editors and I have only myself now. There is a lot to be said about that old saying about curling up at night with an old book. I know because I can still do that, but I have to alone and know it is done. The end has been written and I cannot change that. So those late nights? So empty and cold no matter how much I stoke the fire, try and find warmth in my trusty robe and see that book on the table that was a symbol of our ongoing life. I'm not ready to ready to read a lot of it, but because I was a part of it, much is memorized anyway and it rips my heart out late in the night. 5 years of a fight with cancer took my partner. I am finding the 'one year' mark a myth about feeling more accepting. What I have had to change is talking to most people about it because it seems a long time to them. They are just missing their buddy, not the person who was their life for over 3 decades. My mind still cannot wrap itself around the foreverness of this. It is the first thing I think of when I wake up and follows me all day. Coming home to the silence is so very hard. I don't even want to talk to most people about him anymore. Then I have to hear their memories when I am drowning in my own. I have no family or close friends, so this is more isolating. There is my public persona and then there is the real me when I am alone. To those that say I seem to doing well I think...you should come by at night. But then they have their families. It is not something anyone who hasn't experienced can even begin to imagine. I thought I did when it was happening to me, but I was so very wrong. This is my first time here so I wanted to give a small summary of what brought me here besides my latest phase in this process.