Anniversary

Until we got married, Kevin and I didn't have an anniversary to celebrate. We were both fuzzy on when we we started hooking up. I know when we decided to become monogomous, but then we broke up twice during the first year. So where do you count from? The first time we got together? The third? And especially considering that I thought we were back together 2 months before Kevin did (and most of our friends assumed it was a month before that), it became impossible to pinpoint a date. So we didn't.

When we got married, we finally had an anniversary to celebrate. Which is pretty much the only thing that changed about our relationship that day. But due to Kevin's work schedule, we only managed to celebrate together once on our actual anniversary. By then we were so used to not celebrating our anniversary that it didn't really matter. We never needed a special day to celebrate anyway.

Since Kevin passed, the anniversaries have multiplied and spread through the year. The day he was diagnosed. The day he went to the hospital for the last time. The day the doctors told us to prepare for the worst. The day we moved him to hospice. The day he died. The day I picked up his ashes. Every birthday and holiday picks up a new level of sadness.

It turns the calendar into a minefield. Every time I start to get my life together, another anniversary arrives like a punch to the gut and scatters everything again. But I think I'm starting to recover a little bit faster each time. I'm spending less time anticipating each anniversary with dread. I'm doing better between the anniversaries. I guess that's all I can ask for.

Is This Healing?

 When you lose someone, they stop and you keep going. Every day takes you farther away from them. And the language you lose enforces that distance in your mind.

I lost him this week.

Last week.

Last month.

Over the summer.

Last year.

I've reached the point where language is starting to fail me. There's no shorthand anymore for how long ago it was. Because it's no longer a short time. 

I expected this to hit me really hard. A year ago when I had to change from "this year" to "last year" I wept. But it didn't.

Grief is unpredictable. There's no way to plan for it. A song will come on the radio and out of the blue there are tears running down your cheeks. Then you brace for something major and it passes right by you.

I'm fine. And it's weird. I'm maybe even better than fine.

One of the things I've seen over and over again is that the second year is harder. The first year you're just trying to get through it. You're in shock and nothing seems real and it's occasionally a struggle to make it through the next five minutes.

But in the second year, reality sets in. You look around and you can start to see the life you were planning to live. You can see all the ways your life is diverging from what you thought it would be. And it's so easy to focus on the ways that life has gotten harder. The gulf between the life you thought you were going to live and the life you're currently living is impassable, and it gets wider every day. But during the second year, it's still narrow enough to see across. The fog has lifted enough that you think you're seeing it clearly.

The thing I'm starting to realize is that some things are easier now. I don't have to fight my frugal husband to get the kitchen of my dreams because I know I have the money. I don't have to come up with a whole strategy to cook and eat a vegetarian meal. I can just do it.

Even stranger is that I realized I like who I am right now. I like who I'm becoming. It both does and doesn't feel like a betrayal.

I know that there are still ups and downs in the future. Grief isn't linear and there are some hard anniversaries coming up. But right now I feel calm and optimistic in a way I haven't felt for a long time. Even if it only lasts for another week, I'm trying to embrace the feeling. To remember that I can get here again, and it's worth getting here.

Falling in Love With January

I've long considered October to be my favorite month. The world cools down. The leaves change colors. There are festivals and fairs, and I always find myself with jam-packed weekends. At least, I did pre-pandemic. Summer is ending, and it feels like I'm starting to wake up.

I recently realized that I love January just as much. On the surface, it seems like this love is for opposite reasons. January is a time to hibernate and cancel all my plans. It's like a deep sigh and collapse after the mayhem of the holidays. A time to rest and heal. But I think the real reason I love January is the same reason I love October - it's a time of change.

January is a time to take stock of you life and make some small adjustments. So many people make new year's resolutions at the end of December, but I'm always too overwhelmed from the holidays. I need to rest a bit first. Then I can start to look around and see what I want to change.

The short days and cold air help facilitate this. Most people want to stay home, which means you end up with fewer plans and more time for introspection. But I find the weather itself healing. I get to see the sunrise every morning when I drop my kids off at school. I get to see the sunset every evening when I pick them up. On some level, it feels like the days are the perfect length.

And then there's the cold, which so many people hate but I find rejuvenating. I went for a walk every day this past week, and it was so nice to not feel like I was overheating. The chill is refreshing. That sharpness in my lungs when I take a deep breath reminds me that I'm alive.

I'm alive.

And I guess that's really it.

October reminds me that death is coming for us all, so I need to enjoy life while I can.

January reminds me that I'm still alive. I still have time.

Every Little Bit Helps

I don't know if you follow the news, but the world is pretty scary right now.

I could be referring to any of a dozen things. Right now I'm talking about climate change. It's terrifying. The world we leave to our kids will be unrecognizable from the one we inherited. And it's so easy to point fingers. It's so easy to talk and talk about all these huge changes we need to make. It's so easy to get paralyzed into inaction because nothing will ever be enough so why do anything at all?

Because if nothing we do matters, then all that matters is what we do.

And yeah, I'm still drawing inspiration from that quote.

There's this thing that pops up again and again that most of the pollution is caused by 100 companies or some bullshit. If those 100 companies disappeared tomorrow, our lives would be drastically different. We are all complicit in this.

But the world is big and complicated and it's impossible to be perfectly morally virtuous with a carbon footprint of zero. So why even try.

Because every little bit helps. Every small change leads to a bigger change.

Anyway, this is the year of small changes for me. Things that are sustainable. Things that maybe don't have a huge impact but that will build over time. Things that will hopefully make it a little less jarring when we are eventually forced to make big changes.

I've replaced all the soap in my house with bar soap. And I'm going to switch to bar shampoo and bar condition and probably bar lotion, too. A little less plastic. We'll never get rid of plastic entirely - if you spend any time in a hospital you'll understand how many lives plastic saves. But we can and should cut back.

I'm eating less meat. This was easier than I expected. When Kevin was alive, we had meat with nearly every meal. I ate beef at least once a week. After he died, beef became more of a treat, something I'd eat once a month if that. I accidentally went three days without eating any meat at all, and that's when I became more deliberate about it. I started looking up more vegetarian recipes. I recently embraced "plant-based meats". I'm still going to eat filet mignon on my birthday for as long as I possibly can. But I can certainly balance that out with meatless Mondays.

I'm on the lookout for other small changes I can make, too. Things that are easy to do. Things that will eventually become second nature so that I can start embracing other changes.

It's so easy to feel helpless in this big, bad world. All you can do is control what you can. And try to do a bit better every day. Just a bit though. It's gotta be sustainable and something you can build on.

Fail Better

 There's this quote I come across every now and then. One of those inspirational mantras that gets recycled over and over.

Ever Tried? Ever Failed? No Matter. Try Again. Fail Again. Fail Better.

It's from Samuel Beckett, who you probably first encountered in a high school English class. One of the greats. Of course his words are inspiring.

But once words are out there, they're open to interpretation. The intent of the reader matters as much as the intent of the author, at least when it comes to finding meaning. Which is why everything means something different to everyone.

Anyway, this year I've decided to fail better by failing deliberately. I decided not to finish my book club's first pick of the year. I set a Goodreads goal of 100 books, then promptly picked up a 650 page book. I can't quite shed my identity as someone who reads 100 books a year, even though I know on some level that I can't currently read 100 books a year. Maybe someday I'll be back to 100 books a year like it's nothing. Maybe I'll never get back there. Who knows what the future will bring. For now, deciding that I'm not going to read 100 books feels easier than deciding that I am going to read 50 or 75 books.

Life has been pretty disappointing lately. Both in big ways and small. I've gotten myself in a rut over the past few months, and I'm having a hard time shaking myself out of it. It doesn't help that all the plans I make lately get thwarted. By COVID or snow or something else outside of my control. It's demoralizing, this chafing up against circumstances that I can't change.

I've always had a tendency to get stuck. My routines keep me going when life gets hard. They also trap me. Kevin was good at shaking me out of it. He brought spontaneity to my life. He made me brave. But he's not here now, and for the sake of our kids I have to find a way to do it on my own.

I've been failing at so many things for so long. But most of it's been out of my control. So I'm flipping the script and embracing it.

It already seems to have jogged something loose.

Book Meme - Day 31

What would be on the soundtrack for your favorite book?

Well this is a bummer of a question to go out on, because I don't really have any idea how to answer it. Sometimes I'll connect a specific character to a certain song. Like Denna and Richard Thompson's "Beeswing". But coming up with an entire soundtrack? That just sounds like work I don't want to do.

And since no one is making me do it, I'm not going to.

Book Meme - Day 30

How many books do you typically read in a month? How do you feel about this number?

According to the spreadsheet I started keeping this year, I read 12 or 13 books a month. Which is honestly a little high. I'm reading more this year than I ever have in the past, and it's hitting the point where that's probably not a good thing.

Reading is an effective way to learn more about the world around you, to escape when things get too hard, to pass the time when your bored. But I need to start making time for other things again. I want to find time to practice yoga regularly or go for a bike ride. I want to hang out on the couch with my husband and watch TV or even a movie. I want to write more (actually, I'm doing way better at this this month).

Then again, all those things require a solid chunk of time - 45 minutes at least. And at Gavin's current age, it's hard to carve out that kind of time. It's much easier to find five minutes to read another page or two of a book.

I'm going to read more books this year than I ever have before. I think I want this to go down as my record year. Not that I'm going to stop reading altogether or anything. But I need to start getting back to other things.

If only there weren't so many books I want to read. A big part of this is that I need to stop buying books so I don't feel as much pressure to read so fast.