Hanging by a moment

I’ve really be struggling lately with my grief. An entire year has almost gone by since I lost my husband, and some days I feel like it just happened. It feels like an out-of-body experience. Waking every morning to a world that is no longer mine. Wandering through a house filled with our things, covered with pictures of us and all of our memories, and feeling like a stranger inside my own walls. Ever since I lost my Joe, I have felt incomplete. He was ripped away from me like an arm or a leg would be. Amputated from my body, leaving only half of my heart left to figure out how to live without him.

When Joe was going through cancer treatments, we had a motto: #kfg (keep f*cking going). We even got matching tattoos, in his handwriting, to remind ourselves what to do. I see this tattoo every single day. So why can’t I seem to follow my own advice?

Some of my struggle has been trying to determine what I am supposed to do now. As if because he’s gone, I have to turn my life upside down and become someone else. What a relief it is to realize I don’t need to change. Trying to reinvent yourself in the middle of grief is unmanageable, not to mention exhausting. I’ve been beating myself up because I’ve felt so out of control. Why? Because the last time I felt that way the love of my life died.

“I know I’ve been living for the only thing I know. I know I’m running and not quite sure where to go.” I also know I just took those lines from this song. Living in the past and being sad for the way things used to be or being anxious about what’s to come in the future.

None of that is helping me survive in the present.

My purpose as Joe’s wife may be over. But my purpose as a mom, a sister, a friend, a co-worker is still the same. My husband being gone doesn’t change who I am to anyone else. It only changes who I was with him. Yes, it’s lonelier. Yes, its isolating sometimes. I do have to work on minimizing those times for my own mental wellbeing.

But I am still me. I just need to stop hanging by a moment, before the moments pass me by.