grieving

Two Years Out: What Feels Possible

Every time I talk to other widows, the subject of how grief feels at different time intervals comes up. I posted last week about it being two years since my husband died, but I didn’t talk about milestones. I reread the milestone posts I made at 3 months out, 16 weeks out, 6 months out, and 7 ½ months out, and it was helpful to see documentation of myself moving forward. It often feels like I’m stuck, especially since my depression came back in the spring, but I’m not actually stuck.

Milestones:

  • The biggest shift for me has been feeling engaged with my job again. I loved my job as a professor until Tom died and since then, it’s been disorienting to not feel deeply connected to my work. Since my sabbatical ended and I returned to work at the beginning of June, I’ve been pleasantly surprised to experience the old feeling of excitement about projects at work again. I hadn’t gotten my hopes up that I would feel energized by work again, figuring it would be a long slog toward retirement, so this was a wonderful surprise. Also work-related, two colleagues and I collaborated on an edited scholarly collection that will likely be under contract very soon.
  • I am nearly done writing a book geared toward helping young-ish/middle-aged widows through the first year. Within the next week or two, I’ll be ready to start looking for a publisher. Generating the material for the book has been relatively easy, but organizing it into something that will be useful to another widow has taken a part of my brain that I think was out of commission for a long time after my husband died.
  • I have made great progress on Garage Mahal. There’s still a lot to go through and get rid of, but the space is cleared out enough that I was able to move a party that was supposed to take place outside into the garage when it started raining.
  • As the item above indicates, I’ve entertained. Once. My husband and I used to throw dinner parties and other gatherings several times a year and the thought of doing it without him felt insurmountable for a long time. In the spring, I started thinking about hosting a celebration for my daughter’s 21st birthday and over the course of a few months, I got more and more excited about the idea.
  • I’m enjoying cooking again. Cooking was a reliable relaxer and stress-reducer for me for decades, but after my husband died, I had no appetite for months. When my appetite finally came back, I had to have unexpected brain surgery and lost my appetite again. It’s finally back and cooking is interesting again.

What I’m still not ready to do:

  • Scatter the last of his ashes. I’ve now scattered my husband’s ashes in South America, the Pacific Ocean, and his favorite place in Oregon. Friends scattered some in the Colorado River. There’s one last place I need to scatter them: in a wide-open valley. All the places I’ve scattered them have had special meaning, but the wide-open valley feels particularly personal to me. The last camping trip we took before his stroke was to a wide-open valley. When I look at photos of us together, the first ones I go to are from that trip. A few days before he died, we talked about what happiness looked like to each of us and he said, “A wide-open valley to camp in.” I feel like when I scatter part of him in a wide-open valley, something will be over or finished, and I’m not ready for that.
  • Camp and raft. These activities still feel out of reach for me, especially rafting. I have never rafted without Tom. I know I will eventually find my way back to both. Shortly after Tom died, a friend told me about an organization that hosts grief raft trips. I have kept that idea in the back of my mind and am tentatively planning to do one of their trips next summer.
  • Figure out what to do with his T-shirts and socks. He had a vast collection of quirky T-shirts and socks. I was going to commission a friend to make the T-shirts into a quilt, but every time I look at the basket overflowing with his shirts in the closet, my heart says, “Not yet.” The socks I have no plan for beyond continuing to hoard them for now.
  • Do something with his knife-sharpening supplies. Who else would take up knife sharpening as a hobby after a stroke? Just thinking about the unique audacity of that choice makes me burst into tears and laughter at the same time. As weird as it sounds to say, the knife sharpening equipment has sentimental value for me.