Earlier this week, while picking up a prescription, I squirmed a bit when Sara insisted that I should have some time to myself.  I tried to kid her a little, saying that work served that purpose but she didn’t buy it. 

I realize that Sara is right; it is important to take time for myself.  But time to myself rarely happens around here.  There is the occasional hour when YaYa is down the street at the neighbor’s house and BoBo is out with his friends.  These days it seems that I can’t even go to the bathroom without someone (or some dog) hovering near the door.

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Although I never fully appreciated the extent of it, I always thought that my husband, Tom, was brilliant is many ways. Writing was one area that he excelled in.  Tom had a way of adding several dimensions of depth into his writing.  Choosing words which appeared on the surface to mean one thing, yet deeper down held far more significance. 

I loved to watch him toil over his writing.  He would work on the same piece for weeks or months, sometimes returning to it, years later, in order to get it just right.  But I didn’t always appreciate his craft. 

He’d read the same poem over and over as the edits were made.  After he read it out loud he waited for our feedback.  I often thought that he could strengthen the piece by cutting it into a few shorter poems.  He didn’t always appreciate my telling him so. 

The length and complexity of the poems meant that I had to concentrate for too long to stay with his thoughts. 

Tom was close to his writing.  Mostly writing about death, we joked that his blog was the death blog.  Because of the topic, it was sometimes disturbing.  That was part of the craft for him – make the reader squirm a little.

You see, Tom was always grieving.  From the moment I met him, he’d already been hit with a loss that I can only imagine – the loss of a child.  Stupidly I thought that I could heal it.  But you cannot heal someone else’s grief; it is theirs to mend. 

Over the years the losses of others near and dear to him came fast and furious.  I don’t think he could keep up with the darkness that accompanied the pain, so he wrote about it.  Nearly every one of his pieces had grief woven into it. 

Now that I have lost Tom, I read his work and pick out the phrases with an appreciation for his pained virtuosity.  I suppose that I finally get it.

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.

Support group felt a little strange this week. I wondered if the addition of one facilitator changed the dynamics a bit. On the other hand, it could have just been the three weeks of between sessions, OR maybe it was just ME.

Part of the weirdness was due to the fact that I was there after having a good day. Yes, I had a “good” day. It was a sharp contrast to the rest of the members of the group. It had been a productive day at work where I accomplished the same amount of work in that one day as I did in all of last week. Being busy provided me with a good distraction from the feelings that usually cloud my days.

Our first exercise was to circle faces representing the different emotions we’d experienced in the day. I was done in a couple of minutes and watched the rest as they continued making circle after circle. By the time we were done I had a total of five emotions circled, while my fellow groupies had 14-21 different emotions. I was certainly the odd man out.

By the time my turn in the discussion occurred, I had more to discuss than just my day. It was the contrast of night and day that I talked about. I explained that while my day was generally good, the worst was yet to come as evenings are the hardest part of the day for me. I went on to provide an example for them, describing a night that I made soup from a can for my children’s dinner AGAIN and then ate a piece of bread. I realize that I could do worse. My kids actually love Chicken Noodle Soup. What bothers me most has less to do with my dinner short-cuts, and more to do with my lack of motivation to feed my kids properly. Providing healthy, well-balanced meals is my job! It is just so hard to cook healthy meals when I have no appetite of my own. I eat out of duty, not based on hunger. Consequently, I eat whatever is around. If we are out of something, I figure out a substitute to avoid going to the store unless absolutely necessary.

It may sound strange to you. It might even worry you. But the thing is nobody in the group was at all surprised. We’ve all been experiencing tough times. Some members in the group are years past their loss. For each, this journey is different but much of the background (inability to focus, lack of motivation, exhaustion, lack of or excessive appetite, loneliness) is similar, if not the same. I took comfort in knowing that I am not the only one. I left group and went straight to the store and didn’t leave until I had the required ingredients for three whole dinners.

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