Roadtrip!

One of my favorite memories will always be of this massive roadtrip we took.  His brother was getting married 3 states away, and I'd never seen that part of the country so we took a week and a half and drove.  It was marvelous.  People would say "And you're still together?" but the same thing that brought us together in the first place surfaced in the car - we liked to just be together and appreciate life.

So you can understand that roadtripping without him is monumental.  MONUMENTAL.  Driving to my parents' house 3 hours away was difficult.  Leaving my house - at all - was difficult.  So being away from my house and driving about 1400 miles is, for me, a huge milestone.

And I loved it.  I loved every second of it.  Something I learned from my earlier (smaller) trips this fall is I'm doing really well with driving by myself.  I chill out, I talk to him, I go into my head, I zone.  Somehow, even tho I used to hit my limit of driving around 3 hrs, I can go all day behind the wheel of a car now (I credit him). 

This definitely goes into my new life: doing the things I want to do, things that used to make me happy, used to enjoy - alone.  It's huge that I can enjoy these things at all without being overwhelmed by grief.  It's awesome that instead I'm walking away with a feeling of accomplishment, of ability.  I'm centered.  I feel like I know myself better and that I'm living the life I've chosen rather than the one that's been pushed on me.  I'm feeling more like myself.

It's an awesome, awesome feeling.

It's not that he's not with me - because he always is - but it's that I'm no longer trapped by what I've survived.

Two and a half

It was two years ago today that I started feeling like I might survive. I’d been waiting for 26 weeks – 26 weeks seemed like a lot – and now it’s been 130.  And I’m still here.

It's surviving something that I wasn't supposed to experience, wasn't prepared for, had no clue how to handle, and flat out didn't want to do.  It's surviving coming home every night to an empty house, cooking for one with no one else to enjoy it, finding a new job to replace his income, taking roadtrips by myself, and making over the house in the way we wanted to do the new house.

I still miss him.  I'll always miss him.  I miss the spice he added to my life, support when I had a bad day, the person I thought of before anything.  I still visit the cemetery, wear his hoodie on the deck, smoke his brand just to smell the familiar scent and drink his beer.  We chat all the time (and I swear he talks back) and in many ways, it feels more to me like a new stage in our relationship rather than no relationship at all.

I still can’t explain how much he gave to me or what he meant to me.  He was my everything, and in so many ways still is.

I wonder where my strength comes from, and I think it comes from him.  It comes from the love we had together, and the faith we had in each other. It comes from steadfastly believing this was not something he chose, this is not how he wanted to leave me, and he always wanted a better life for me than this.  I know what he wanted for us, and for reasons beyond his control, he became unable to provide that.  So now it’s just me and it's up to me to provide it for myself.  I owe it to him to do so.

You don’t think at 30 that you have to recreate your life, that in a blink of an eye all your plans for the future will just be gone.  You don’t think that you might be spending the next 70 years living without him.  But that’s exactly what I’m doing.

He wouldn't want me to roll over and stop living my life.  So my life... this weird combination of with him and without him... I'm living.

Be your own happiness

Happiness is often a struggle, which really shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone.  One thing I've been "working on" this year is being my own happiness... trying to remember what made me happy before him, and get those things back.  Or, happy with him, but that I can do on my own.

One thing I always loved was getting out of a town.  Give me a 3-day weekend and I'm a happy camper.  Go north, south, east - wherever my friends are or they want to meet me, I'll go.  And, of course, so would he.  It makes it more complicated that he was the destination for some of those roadtrips, he was with me for others, and our major roadtrip we took together.  So as much as this is happiness, it's also melancholy.

My friend convinced me into 2 roadtrips this fall, in addition to a college reunion.  This raised the additional problem of what to do with the house, since I developed an anxiety in leaving the house in the months after he died (people asking to come take things from it whenever they want will do that to you).  But for the first time in almost 2.5 years, I wasn't anxious.

It helps that I took 'him' with me.  It helps that brother checked on the cat.  It helps that I have a homebound neighbor who notices everything.  And I gotta think, yes, it was just a matter of time.

And yes, this is a huge step for me.

And then, just to nudge further...

I had the pleasure of having dinner with 2 good friends.  We caught up about everything, and at one point the husband said to me, "Reading everything you write and hearing about how people have treated you, it just makes me think, 'It's time to be AJ.'" And that's as clear as anyone's ever put it, and as clear as they can.  I've done enough, and it's time to be me.

And I took that attitude with me into that weekend and the next.  I was me - I was the me I was before him, the older woman he made me, the wiser woman losing him made me - but I was just me.  And that's all I can be.

Meeting him changed my life, losing him changed it more, but at the end of the day the only person I can be is me.  I can't change that for anyone.  I can't change my grief for anyone.  I can't change my lifestyle for anyone.  I'm just... me.

And somehow, that put it all into perspective.

I started out talking about happiness and this is what it boils down to: I'm happiest when I'm just being me.  When I've been driving this fall, and just me, I've been happy.  When I've been sitting on my couch with a good book, I've been just me and I'm happy.  When I'm with a friend at happy hour, I'm just me and I'm happy.  I can accept his loss as a part of my history and it's changed me.

When people try to tell me how it changed me, should change me, or what I need to do differently now, I get confused, mad, and lose my way.  When I look to other people to reflect what I think should be my happiness, I get disappointed.  But when I'm just me, I'm happy.

And I love that I'm finding 'me' again.  Some things I've loved forever - roadtrips, books, football - other things come from him - beer, our deck, food.  The new me isn't the old me, but it is working into a combination of the two, and this new identity is as much a part of me as referring to myself as 'widow' rather than 'wife.'  It's accepting what's happened, working it into my life, and discovering my new happiness.

Because at the end of the day, we all need to be our own happiness.