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.