It’s past 4 am. I find myself alone with my thoughts and unable to return to sleep since awakening at 2:30 am. The dogs sleep on the floor of my room. Lucky’s snores remind me of Tom.
I’ve been thinking about time. How strange it is that so much time has passed and yet if feels like just yesterday when my life was beginning to crumble. When I think back on the chain of events, it is easy to pinpoint the turning points. It was January 29th, when my life started down the painful path to be remembered forever. I only need to look to my blog to check the date of my skipped blog entry (which still sits on the pad of paper that I wrote it on). We didn’t know of the tumors then, but I mark the date as the turning point nonetheless.
Once more the date is circling around. The 1st year anniversary of my husband’s passing is beginning to encroach on me already (even though his death actually occurred in March). It’s so hard to believe that it’s been this long. Time has sped up, as my life has seemed to be at a standstill.
It is hard not to try to analyze it all. My “good” days, as I now call them, are the sort of days that I would have been bored, even disappointed, with. They are the sort of days where I sit aimlessly on the couch watching Drake and Josh, iCarly, or Spongebob Squarepants with the kids. I wouldn’t have been able to sit there before. These days, I’ve decided that these could be the moments that we all remember. This could be as good as it gets. So I’ve been sitting and trying to just enjoy it – and now I actually do.
Tom used to criticize me for being uninformed. Now I am even more at fault in that department. It’s probably been at least 6 months since I’ve watched the news, and I’ve only perused the headlines if I happen to walk past a newspaper. The radio is probably my only means of awareness, which means that I am more knowledgeable about Brittany than the war in Iraq.
I’d like to think that I’ll make time for rounding out my knowledge, as Tom was so amazingly adept at, but I am also afraid that doing so would consume me to the point of alienation from my children. Is it unfair to think that Tom did just that? Often he was home, but rarely was there more than a few minutes of just hanging out with the kids. I did that for the two of us.
Where does that leave me? At 4:45 am, I sit awake in bed wondering what purpose my life has. Why am I here on earth? How can I make my life more meaningful? It is up to me to decide what I want to accomplish here, but my mind is blank.
I guess I’ll sleep on it.
In my experience at the end of the day, the kids are the meaning of life. The stuff you do for yourself is a well earned bonus.
Vince said it all.
I let a lot of things in life go by while I just hung out with my kids and I don’t regret a second of that time. It was precious. That having been said, you have to take care of you, too.
And you do – you run.
Keep running, keep pace….your life will feel brighter and lighter at some point. I suspect that point is still a few months in the future but it will happen – I know it will.
Well…I’m not exactly running right now. If you read the entry that I just posted you’ll see that my running isn’t quite happening. At least on the weekends.