Patty65

Marg and Cookie, Thank you so much for posting what you did. I've been dealing with those things silently - and haven't been quite able to express any of it out loud - the horrible images that come so often of the rapid deterioration... the heartbreak of my strong, tough, truck-driving man losing his dignity. He used to tell me that if he was ever ill and not going to make it, he would drive off in his truck and never be seen from again. I would tell him, it's an island, I'll track you down! When he was passing, I asked him to haunt me, but these images are not what I meant. (((hugs))) Patty

Oh GIn, me too... I look through the progression of pictures, and I see it. How couldn't have I THEN? It's so hard to see what we couldn't/didn't then... (((hugs)))

my struggle of today.. I've had to take on some chef shifts, cooking for take out orders because my chef quit and my new one doesn't start till next week. When I do that job, I use Ron's knife. Ron spent about 6 months picking out that knife. It was over $100, and he waited and waited to buy it, a Wusthof knife, and was so excited to order it last year about this time. It came in just a week or so before Christmas. He used it a few times before going on the Christmas vacation that he never recovered from. He used to hide it in his drawer, and didn't want anyone else to use or dull his special knife. I bought him a diamond-dust knife sharpener last Christmas. When he was in Hospice, he slightly recovered with steroids from the brain swelling, and regained some speech, although the tumors kept him from saying much. One day I wanted to ask him a question to gauge his comprehension. I thought of the knife as a question. I asked, "honey, I was wondering if you would mind if I borrowed your wusthof knife today?" He said, agitated, "you all are counting me as gone already!" The only "you all" there was in his life was me, and the Hospice nurses. I was now lumped in with them. Which meant it was no longer the two of us against whatever outside obstacles there were, which is how it was always. He was frustrated with the nurses - aware enough of their simple-baby-talk and the rest of the changing of him that went with it. My proud man, and now I was one of them. I was horrified at his own thought of his death, which I totally, totally didn't believe still, and told him I wouldn't use it, and I vowed not to push him to take my homeopathic treatments or push him in any way, and to make the hospice house experience for him a re-creation of our life at home, curled up together watching a show or listening to music. I was devastated that I upset him. And that he considered me like one of the nurses we were struggling so much with. And now, as I use the knife, I feel the tear between using it because it was so special to him, and therefore me, and the bad flashes of those scenes, and so many more, of those final days. So many flashes of it all as I approach the anniversary of it all as the anniversary of when it all started approaches. Thanks for listening... and for a place for this to land outside of the circling hurt in my head about it... Patty

Make so much sense Mitch -- You do/create/plant things in her honor to create a physical embodiment of her essence -- Her essence survives because you live -- and you derive solace from that. I think the key is the last part. It gives you solace. Any way we can get that, that is a good, often rare thing.

Those are beautiful pics, Laurie! Jackiel, welcome to our family here. I am sorry for the reason... I too lost my husband in February. Dealing with how everyone around us in our day to day lives comes second only to the lonliness and ache and grief and devastation to all the rest of the time. We find tiny snippets in peace talking with those who truly get it, and allow us to be where we are at this moment, and sometimes that is hard to find, and sometimes it is hard to reach out for, at least for me. I hope you find friendships and support here from all of us who understand all the extremes as we all navigate this new world without the one person we need the most to help us steer. Take care, Patty

Opposites coexisting - "My other half" as the saying goes. We all don't have to imagine what it is like to be chopped in half and try to live that way, because we are already there, it's just not visible. I keep Ron's legacy going because it is the only thing that keeps me alive day to day. Call it his legacy to the island, call it the only thing keeping me alive to myself. I hated seeing myself saying Ron's name and smiling at the same time. Because the opposite that co-exists is brutal reminders of the ghost of everything he was to Maui Pasta. Yet it is what keeps me waking up each morning. You can imagine how much I hated myself for launching that go-fund-me campaign, "using Ron's cancer and ultimate death" "to benefit" Maui Pasta in the name of keeping his dream/legacy alive. But I've HAD to come to terms with it. It's all I had. I did what I had to do to survive, I guess. My friend - the one I have such a disconnect with over "proper grief" -- asked me what I had decided to do for Thanksgiving. I said what she wanted to hear -- that I was staying home alone, trying to find some peace at spending time there, and doing yardwork to "work off my sadness"... "You Go Girl!" and a lot of hearts was the response. Of course there is no such thing as "working off grief" with yardwork. Distract for a while maybe. Distracting ourselves with a stupid show or movie is as much "honoring" as anything else, as it keeps us alive for a little while longer. It's hard enough accepting my own reality of grief in a world that I have to suit up and show up in every day, let alone figuring out/accepting how the rest of our world accepts/responds to me for how they perceive I accept my grief. Sometimes the politically correct thing to say is what is easiest on ME. Rambling...

It was so much easier to care about ourselves when we had a reflection of love on us from our partners. I could love myself and take care of myself so much more easily when I was reminded every day that I am loved. Not only with those words, but just with a look or a laugh or a hug, or a million other practically imperceptible things. Maybe that is codependence, but at this point, it doesn't matter. I feel it strongly -- I don't even like to admit it -- how I could care less about caring for myself, from sleep to eating to working too much. I eat to take away hunger pangs. I sleep when nothing keeps me awake anymore, and I rarely (ok basically never) "R&R" because there is no reason to. I try and try to figure out why or how I CAN care. It is still a conundrum for me. Maybe that makes me an open book for everyone to see I have low self esteem that was masked with Ron's love. We all have our baggage, and logically I can tell myself I am a valuable human being, that there is artwork and writing and food to create and share, valuable love and advice to give to my daughter, things I still want to learn and master -- but somehow old childhood esteem issues seem to dominate -- issues I had worked through long ago that were solidified with Ron's love. "Why bother? Who cares?" Is always present. Thinking that I've regressed makes the effect of it all worse. Admitting this only sends to me messages of being weak, and now alone to fend for myself, that is dangerous to be perceived as weak. It's like the angel and the devil on each shoulder, whispering messages. Only my angel is gone. I've just worked SO hard for so many years even before meeting Ron to love myself and feel confident in this world and with who I am -- and my reward was finding and accepting true love, which escalated self love, and it is devastating to feel myself slip so far back. And thus far my solution is to "act as if" as my therapist would say. We can "act as if" we love ourselves as we trudge and tread through this thick mud of grief quicksand. To have hope one day I can find a self that was proud and confident. To "act as if" we want to take care of ourselves by making the doctor's appointments or eating right or whatever. It's just really, really hard to occupy that space and stay there. Not sure I made any sense. Thanks for listening to my rambling thoughts. Important, hard topic for me. Patty

Today Ron is gone 9 months, three quarters of a year. Been through this 23rd date 9x. When Ron left, he set an alarm on my phone that I've written about. It just went off 4 minutes ago. I was in my office and said to my business partner and office intern, "well, exactly three quarters of a year ago RIGHT now, Ron died". It came out without tears, but with depressed, begrudging matter-of-factness. I shake my head quickly as if to shake the memories of Thanksgivings past from off my brain when they pop in my head. We spend our lives celebrating and remembering dates from holidays to birthdays. It makes sense that our dates will always be prominent markers. Have you noticed that wedding anniversary dates, dates we met, etc. were most remembered and celebrated by only the two of you? Seems like these dates of loss slowly become that, it's just us alone who have this indelibly burned into our minds.

Gwen, Sorry you don't even have your F2F time with your counsellor Just another week to dangle and hold on precariously and wait for more time to pass. The "not being able to think of a single..." fills in for me as "a single thing I can stand doing" once I get to the house. Not a show I can or want to watch (especially this week and this next holiday month, all the shows I can tolerate - political comedy news - are off for the season), not an artwork I can muster to do, it's just like -- "Oh no, now what??" with the panic of being left alone with my own thoughts and memories. I hear there's a thing called "alone but not lonely" but that is just an elusive fantasy for me. I totally agree that doing things that we did together in the name of the honor thing -- if it only hurts, then it is not honoring anything. Certainly not ourselves.

OMG! What an unimaginable thought!

just need to post to hold on thru today. tomorrow makes 9 mos. therapist on east coast for the holiday. grateful she is available to text. i just texted her - "... just reaching out for a connection. almost photographic recall of these crazy pre thanksgiving days at the shop last year is tearing at my heart, chef is sick i will have to do it, mauinow interview article just came out (not ready to watch it), 18 catering thanksgiving trays to make, sleepless night - couldnt make the sleep plan work and could only sleep and calm down emotionally after writing a poem at 3am. sigh. omg holidays + grief = torture is such an understatement" i honestly dont know how anyone makes it through the holidays, seems so impossible. i couldn't sleep last night - i had to go outside, and the intensity and beauty of the night sky was nearly violently heart breaking, it is what we would do. this was the poem that emerged. its what we did, watch the night sky, talk about the universe and life and death and everything intimate. i just dont know how to live without that connection, I know so many "single" people do. I feel so weak in my pain, I know I shouldn't, I try to let go of it. sometimes when i try to connect with ron before i sleep, our bedroom slips away and i see the night sky instead of the room. Ours, This Night It was ours, this night The universe calling An utterly moonless pitch black night Exposing a feast of stars Depths of clusters Reaching from infinite horizons To dance with Orion I recall the like vision Behind closed eyes You give me - It was ours, this night Ours to laugh, to cry, to listen, to play To Love From this our spot under dancing stars But wrenching, destroying pain Of Without-You Of Alone. Echoes of our love Sear my soul. We still share it - It still ours, this night.

kay, yes-- i could not help but look at the wedding photos saturday and i must have seen that one a million times, but not since february and i saw this one in such a new way, it said it all about what was.

Thank you... and ((((Karen)))) peace to you too on your anniversary day that we share.

10 years ago today ... ahhhhh how to survive this day, the dreams we wished for that day, the wonder we had at what we would be doing 10 years from then. Anything but this. :'(

It's so hard not to have that buffer, Marg. I miss it so much too.

I know that is a total understatement for you, (((Gin))). Even though I hear it is not advised to be alone or nearly alone through these things, sometimes it feels easier, way easier... than grinning and bearing it. I'm invited to my business partner's and I don't want to go. I probably won't, or if I do, I will put on my armour for an hour and go and eat, or pretend to, so that I don't have to listen to the lectures about being alone. Thanksgiving is the third strike -- our 10 year anniversary this Saturday, 9 month mark on Wednesday, Thanksgiving on Thurs.

This loss of ours takes so many forms, and makes all the rest of the hells that we go through are so much harder. Harder than my business is having nobody to come home and vent and problem solve with, to cry and scream with over the the harshness of life that keeps on going irrespective of our loss of anyone to go through it with. It just sucks. Actually I don't see us as pitying ourselves for our problems... I see it more like being kind to ourselves in our ultra-extreme pain at trying to get through any day without our Love, our echo, our sounding board, our best friend... In fact I kinda see having pity for ourselves and talking about our problems in this new alien world, is the only way to find our way through this barbed wire covered path we are trying to navigate. One careful but painful step at a time. Absolutely exhausting. And we got dropped off in the middle of the path the day our nightmares began. No direction but through. Again it just sucks. The only shows I can manage to watch are political comedies. The news straight-up is just too hard to handle. At the end of John Oliver's show this week, which was his last episode of this horrible year, he did an "anti-tribute" to 2016, that he called " *#$! 2016 " and in between repeating his expletives, he showed all the horrible things that happened this year, and all the wonderful public figures who are now gone. Gosh did I start sobbing. It was Anger at this year, every last day of it, and while his documentation of the bad year was different than mine, to hear that out there --- powerfully validating and painful. Patty

Midnight and the creeping anxiety is setting in. I got through his birthday. Yet even harder was the grief attacks days before. And I couldn't figure out why. It is the holidays, I had been talking about the holidays with my daughter. the vividness with hindsight of his exhaustion last year in his last two months in at home and in the shop. And his only excitement was our annual tradition, our trip back east to see my parents. How much he loved my parents,the loving parents he never had. He'd spent a whole night talking about how much he loved them. And I will be in our footsteps from last year. I have to, it is the path on so many levels. And outside the last month of his life, this feels like the hardest thing. Omg it is so so scary

oh, and the other thing i do is... well, i've mentioned it somewhere here but when ron passed, about 15 minutes after, my alarm on my phone went off, at 1:34PM. I never set it. It was him saying goodbye, I'm convinced. For a while, I turned the "repeat daily" off because the daily reminder when it was all so raw was just too hard. but when he set it from the other side, it was set with 'repeat daily' on, and so a few months ago, I felt it was right to turn it back on to its original state. So, every day at 1:34pm, the alarm goes off. The message I set was a heart emoji. So, when it goes off I'm always at work. I pick up my phone, I put it on my heart, I take it away, I kiss my phone, I take about 10 seconds to tell him how much I love him with my eyes closed, and then I go back to work. My employees have seen this, and I don't care! It's my crazy. But I've embraced it. Because for those 10 seconds, it connects me with my love instead of my pain. The agonizing pain gets ahold of me plenty the rest of the time, it doesn't get those 10 seconds! Patty

Dear Laurie, I turned 51 a couple of weeks ago, so I'm a bit older too , but just the other day I journalled -- "the thought of living decades more without him is repulsive". My husband died 8 months ago from metastatic melanoma that had gone to his lungs and his brain. and everywhere. and from the time we found out, he lived only 55 days. We had just opened up our Pasta Shop together just 8 months before he collapsed. We worked and lived together 24 hours a day - happily. We were each others' everything. In a few weeks, we would have had our 10 year anniversary. My daughter is off at college, and so it is just me now, and the loneliness is the most excruciating thing. Along with here, there is another site called Widowed Village (www.widowedvillage.org) which is quite large --- a little too large for my reclusive self -- but there are all sorts of groups to join that are for people of certain ages as well as groups based on the year that your partner died. I know they have in-person events as well, again, not my thing or interest, I can barely stand a crowd of 10. But I hope if you check it out that you still come here too! This is an amazingly wonderful and supportive group. As for your question how we go on... that is why we are here, I think... we are all figuring out that one, one day at a time, one post at a time, together. I don't think there is one way that lasts, it is whatever gets us through. Nine years ago I had kidney cancer. After my surgery recovery, it took me years to be able to really talk about it and incorporate that into who I was because I was ashamed of it, somehow. Like I was damaged. It finally went away after many, many years. There may be men on the dating sites that would shy away from you because you are a widow, but if they do, they are not the ones who would be right for you anyway! I met Ron on an online dating site. On my profile, it said, "I live on Maui, and I'm not moving!" I'm sure that drove a lot of men away from responding, but it also drove the one man that was for me TO respond. He was always drawn to Hawaii since he was a little boy, and it was meant to be from that point on. Take care, Patty

Hi Robin, I totally relate. I do the same thing. I leave the house each day before dawn, and it happens that right now, Orion is in the sky in the early morning. Some of the final things I said to Ron as he was going was that I was going to look for him in Orion's belt. It was always my favorite constellation, and he had pointed out the rest of the Orion constellation to me. From a few weeks after he was gone, Orion has been gone from the sky on the other side of the planet. A couple of months ago, I noticed it in the early morning, and since then, I have been stopping, tilting my head up, and giving an air kiss to him, and telling him I love him. The first morning I did it, in the silent morning, it sounded so loud and echo-y I figured the whole neighborhood heard it, and I just had to smile. And you know, smiles are often hard to come by but feel surprisingly good if they are real. Now when I look up, I make sure to look for the belt of the constellation, but now I see the whole thing, and now, Ron is my "Man in the Sky" every morning. This amount of pain -- I didn't even know it existed. Hugs, Patty

it's been a horrid week. these dates, just so impossible, feels like I'm waiting for the knock-out blow. about crowds. they are a huge issue for me too. i had an art department meeting at the university the other day, a knot in my throat, tears welling, heart racing, anxiety, and a smile on my face to pretend i was fine. it threw me back like i was the day before, and the day before i was so non functional it felt like the first week after he was gone. hysterically crying at work, unable to drive to go home or do anything, no trigger, just there -- unbearable and unstoppable loss of my One Love. my business partner said i was still plenty productive and its ok. but its not ok, not about not getting work done, but the pain of loss that brings me to my knees. the swollen stinging eyes, the stomach sickened, the massive headache. the thought of the future so hard, i lost the one person who truly understood me, accepted me, loved me. i believe that "lose" is a strong word because i believe his love is still out there for me, it just takes so much energy and work to find it, that when i am weak and need it the most, it is more than i have in me to find or feel. in crowds, in stores, in any place other than maui pasta and home, i honestly feel like an alien in a foreign world lately. My business partner, who is so sweet, just won't take "no" for an answer about thanksgiving. having me join her, or wherever her and her husband are. so my strategy is -- I am going to say yes, and then that morning, i'm going to say -- oh, sorry, can't come. is that wrong? on friday night, my estranged friend invited me over, knowing it was ron's birthday the next day. the one who has not been able to deal with my grief. i said ok, i was hoping for total distraction and NOT talking about it. she asked me if i could bring a piece of cheesecloth from the shop, but given that my mother was in the ER all day with blood clots in her massively swollen feet, and i was texting and calling with my sister all day, i forgot it. my friend was so SO hurt that i forgot, even though i apologized profusely. at the end of the night, she had drunk too much, and she said as I crawled onto the futon to crash for the night, you know, there ARE other people missing ron on his birthday, like me and (her husband), and did you ever THINK to ask US how we are feeling? (aka console them). I didn't know what to say. In my silence, she repeated herself two times more. Finally I said the pain was so involuntary, I cannot just bring it up. She said I should. I said, "it feels like you are scolding me." she huffed out of the room, came back, and said she was not scolding me, she just thought i should get "out of my head" and reach out to others hurting. She has a HUSBAND to console her about Ron, whom she was at most acquaintances with, how can she ask that of ME?? . She walked away, i laid there awake most of the night, left for work before dawn, and thought that was the end of our friendship. it just reinforced how deeply it hurt to lose my Ron, the ONE and only person who understood me. the next day she texted me and apologized. She said she just missed ron, and our old friendship, and her husband reminded her of "what a hard time" they had with her sister after she lost her husband 3 years ago. Is that what I am? a fricken hard time?? just how on earth do you survive when there is no end in sight? my one positive -- my therapist is back on the scene starting next week. after 7 weeks now. what a long haul that was. i have spoken to her a couple of times. thanks for listening, i'm gonna try not to isolate and be here more, it helps being here. patty

Happy birthday, Ron. ❤️?

just peeking in. i am still here.. I just feel like I have no words anymore. yesterday made 8 months. and ron would have been 57 this coming saturday. on that day last year, we lost our beloved black lab, kana, to the road in front of our house. it was a miserable birthday, his last one. and in three weeks from that, will be our 10 year anniversary. i just have no words anymore, or now anyway. but i don't want to lose you guys either. "youre feeling sorry for yourself" my head tells me. "i have a right to, and i can't help it," i reply. but the alone is too too vast these days. some days the shop is too hard to figure out in my fog. i went through a lot of effort to try to dream last night (i let go of my sleep medication routine, which was keeping me from any dreaming). and i did dream. it was just a horrible nightmare though, i should have expected that. it was a cataclysmic end of the world dream, waking up with a horrible headache. so much for wanting to dream, so much for anything. its so damn hard to keep trying to find ways to hold on and feeling worse for the ware for it.

the blackness feels so forever. sometimes the numb does too -- like, oh, i'm better now. but then you are walking down a sidewalk and bam -- you fall into an invisible black pit that popped out of nowhere. its the black and white world. in the black and white world, there is no white when there is black, and no black when there is white. it's crazy-making. it feels like forever. and then it changes. its so fricken hard not to judge ourselves. and it is hard not to withdraw. i think i'm failing the "living without therapy" challenge i am in, myself. but you aren't withdrawing. you posted. and that helped me post too. thank you.