When you lose your person at 30, you also lose the entire future you were planning together. The future that only works if he’s, you know, alive.
I had to dream up a new future for myself. I realized that early on, that not only was I grieving the loss of my best friend, my person, my everything, but I was also grieving the life that I will never have. It took me some time to figure out what this life looks like, and I’m still not there honestly. I struggle to enjoy it. I focus on every little thing I can to make me smile. But I’m light years from where I was 10 years ago.
It was around eight or nine years that I realized the grief I’m still dealing with has little to do with him, and everything to do with me processing that loss in my life, the loss of the life we were living together, and the loss of the future that we will never have.
So when I was asked a couple months ago how long has it been, and I realize it would be 12 years on 12 April, and in our society we have this thing called “golden birthdays” where your age matches the date of your birthdate… And is there such a thing as a golden death day?
Because widows have to have a certain sense of humor in order to survive the life in which we are living, we all thought yes. That should be a f@cking thing.
And that is how I come to find myself cooking golden Guinness cupcakes this weekend. Guinness cause if you knew Nate, Bailey’s in the cream cheese frosting, and well it’s a golden something day, so there you go.
Because the more I live the more I realize that my living is about my surviving. It’s about surviving something that I wasn’t expecting to happen to me, we weren’t expecting to happen to him, and it isn’t the life we were planning on together. The fact that I lost everything in about 10 seconds, and I am still on this earth is really a miracle. So as weird and disrespectful this may seem to some, I am going to celebrate my survival.
