countdown to 2

"you really care how it's going with me?"

"sure. i make my face look like this and concerned words come out."

that's what it feels like sometimes.

i am way past one year. past 18 months. i am 11 days shy of it being 2 years since my Dragon died suddenly. 2 years. and where am i? some days are okay. i make things for people and i work at Build-A-Bear. so far *knock wood* i make my bills. my son and daughter bought me a car that i am getting the tags and plates and inspection done next Tuesday. i smile at people. i jump through all the hoops i am supposed to. i still cry everyday but not even my daughter knows i do that. i have iron control over it, much like i used to when i was a child and my mother disciplined me, or when i was older and Voldemort got mad. i could always control it and then let my guard down when i was alone. but what have i done? digressed? simply gotten back to an old habit? i do not cry at work. never. i have been close but i stop myself, and i manage to wait until i get back to the apartment and cry here.

but then i have bad days. really bad days. if they happen on a work day, i suppress and suppress and then go back to the apartment and sob. i miss him. i still do. very, very much.
i do not know where i am on the Seven Choices, or the 12 Steps, or the 5 Stages. no clue. i just know that i do what is expected of me. i do what is asked of me. i have stood up for myself a few times lately. i have said, "no, i cannot do that." but i feel so different. i feel like i am only half here. i look at the moon so much. i know what phase it is in, waning or waxing, the day it will be 100% and what the cloud cover is expected to be.
my moon collection is quite impressive now. devastatingly impressive. i dream of him quite a lot. i have had no feeling that he is near. i do not know if my mind is trying to hold me back or if i eat entirely too much chicken and not enough vegetables. am i a failure or am i just dragging my feet on the 'ole grief timeline because of all the financial pressures and failure to be anyone's friend. i am working on it but i hesitate to be too forward. i have been burned so many times.

i have no history here. i am only someone who grieves and is very poor. i can sew like nobody's business and it does attract people to me, but then i open my mouth and ..........

i have no idea what he saw in me. he loved to have conversations. he would prod my brain. we'd discuss. we'd debate. he was such an intellectual person to be so earthy and passionate. both sides of his brain worked in tandem. very smart man. street smart. mad skills. sexy. so handsome. kind. funny. the whole package.

i wonder if he knows how much i cry for him, mourn him, think of him, dream of him, pine for him? i am beginning to think that nothing will help ease the sorrow but time. talking is nice but my grief is the same. working is wonderful but i am still sad. taking charge of my life and getting out from under Voldemort has been freeing but i still miss my Dragon. i miss him to the point where i am not one of those widows who redefines her life after her husband's death as a big second chance. maybe i am too old. maybe i have gone through too much. i was world-weary when i met my Dragon. i thought, "ah, here is life giving me my turn at love and companionship. i guess it is true. sometimes life saves the best until last." and then he died, and i am bereft.

i do things to amuse myself. i have Bunny. i made her some gloves and embroidered her jeans as you can see in the first photo in this post above. i created the Traveling Bunny, Ambassador of Grief and Whimsy so that everyone can have a turn with her, talking to her, writing in her journal. it seemed like a good idea and a lot of people are excited about her coming.

but i am looking down the barrel of the 2nd anniversary and the Valentine's Day funeral anniversary. i work those days and that is fine. i can do it. Spartan control over my emotions while i am at work. but i know i will cry. i know what i get back to the apartment, the numbness will wear off and i will feel his absence.

i am trying to find that balance, take those steps, get through those phases, and make those choices that will show i am growing as a person. people will look at me and say, "ah, she is getting better. she is conquering her grief. she is {dare i type it?} 'making something positive' out of her husband's death."

i cannot focus on any of it for too long. all the steps or phases or choices, they all seem like great theories or suggestions but i cannot get my mind around any one of them. all i want to do is try and redefine the word "home." the apartment is where i live and have lived for almost 2 years yet i cannot feel like it is home. but it is, isn't it? my stuff is here, or some of it. i need to redefine the word "home" and feel it on an emotional level.

i need to get over not being able to save him. i tried and failed. it's cruel to the both of us but that's how it played out. he needed me and i failed. i didn't want him to go, and i failed. but i guess he is at peace now and doesn't give a rat's ass anymore. all i can ever hope now is that he knows how hard i tried. he knows i still love him and am honoring his memory by telling all the cool stuff about him and ignoring the tidbits like he balled his socks and tossed them on the floor, or that he......

seriously there was very little about him or anything that he did that annoyed me. he was freakin' perfect. not annoyingly perfect, but heavy sigh, rapid heartbeat, big smile perfect. he was mine.

i am still, even now, discovering things about him, aspects of the life that we shared, that make me miss his presence. i have irrevocably lost the only person who ever took the time to know me, and who, after he did, still found something about me to love. he would go to bed with his arm around me, our legs intertwined, and then wake up and still smile at me. he chose me. he chose to be with me every day. i didn't annoy him. he never asked anything of me but to love him and share his life.

and my God we did that. i love him and i shared his life. and now, i guess i am sharing his memory.

am i better now than i was a year ago? maybe, i guess, but no, i don't really think so. i think i am a little bit the same. i just control it better. i am more accustomed to missing him. where that puts me on a grief timeline somewhere, i have no idea. and i am not checking right now. right now i am on the countdown to 2 years. it was a rough Christmas and bad New Year's. my birthday sucked big time and i am already getting teary over the 2 year milestone. so i am focusing on keeping control of my public emotions. while i am at work, i give 110% so that i do my job well and keep my managers liking me.

but on the inside, i am still that shellshocked woman sitting by her dead husband feeling the room slowly grow cooler as she listens to the sound of Dragon's wings grows fainter and fainter.

when i lost him, i lost me.

don’t shake your head at me. please, first, just read what i have to say.

there are some who have nothing lives; lives that are only survived rather than truly lived and enjoyed. as a child i was deathly afraid of my parents. i wasn’t what they wanted and my personality was not confrontational or rebellious. also, i was too afraid. corporeal punishment was not a theory with my mother. she believed in it. i was not a bad child. i simply loved being outdoors searching for rocks, drawing what i saw, wading in the creek, patting the cows on their noses, cloud watching, star gazing. i was a geeky kid who loved riding my horse and found i could escape that way or through books. i wanted to be a child and to grow up in peace. instead i was molded and criticized and threatened and pounded into something i could never be. i was never her dough to be shaped. i was a human being and all that shaping hurt.

my first husband never loved me and i was too naïve to see through the lie until it was too late. marriage can be a trap and one partner can evolve into a POW. that person may have to wait for the right opportunity and become the collateral damage to keep children safe. appearances can be deceiving and some of the prettiest people are wearing mask upon mask upon mask to hide what really lives inside. i tried once and tragically failed to escape. the cost was untold, to this day. i know what it cost but i can never tell. cost untold explained.

and then i was allowed to have my Dragon.

i will never meet anyone like him again. there isn’t anyone like him. he is the last of a breed that the world will probably never need again. even when he was in his prime, there were not that many who did what he did and now, the way the world addresses war, everything is different. he’d tell me his stories and i’d be in awe. i could see in his eyes that sometimes he was in awe of the fate that kept him alive out there to come back.

there will never be anyone like him for me for a myriad of reasons not the least of which is the kind of person i am. if my own parents didn’t like me, my brother abandons me because of my conversion to Catholicism, and being quiet and polite didn’t make my mother-in-law like me any better than my husband, how can i believe there will be someone like my Dragon who will see me and care about me? Dragon is one of a kind and how he fell in love with me is beyond me but i have seen small miracles.

i’m not down on myself exactly. i have simply learned from history that i do not grow enough on people for them to want me as anything more than a supplier of goods, an armchair therapist, and/or a crutch to use for a while and then discard.

my Dragon stayed with me. he believed in me. we were two halves of a whole.

i know what is said to those who are grieving. “You will want to put them on a pedestal, but try to remember that they were not perfect. They had flaws and so did your marriage. If you glorify them, you will never get past their death to move on.”

i get where this is coming from and why it is put out there but what about the tiny few of us, me for instance, who already had their spouse on a pedestal? i already had my Dragon in a sacred place in my heart. our marriage was great. our lives were hard financially but our love was true and good and everything i’d read and heard love could be. our marriage was poetry. after living as i had in fear and pain, to be the Dragon’s wife was akin to believing God had suddenly remembered i was here and wanted me to have a gift. my children were gifts but worked so hard to protect them. in a way, i still do, just no longer in the physical sense. but mental abuse is just as tiring. just as exhausting.

my Dragon was a gift in that it seemed he was solely there for me. he loved me. he had flaws, sure, but i loved his flaws so to me, they were just part of being with him. i knew what he’d been through as a Marine and how it had changed him. i love him for all of it. he is the most incredible person i have ever met and yes; there is that pedestal that i will always make people walk around. i kept it dusted and taken care of while he lived and i will do it now that he is dead. in essence i haven’t changed at all.

people, you have to understand. he loved me and for someone like me you don’t know what an incredible thing that is. he valued my opinion. he thought i was smart. he loved my art. he loved my heart and my mind. he thought i was pretty. can you imagine that? me. he thought i was pretty, beautiful in fact. “My lovely bride.” my own mother didn’t think i was pretty until she had dressed me and tried to put make up on me. i thought i looked like a six- dollar whore and was one of those girls in the restroom at school, though i was rubbing it all off rather than putting it on. from that i got the nickname Fluke. i wasn’t into fashion and makeup and didn’t start reading Vogue and W until i got a job as a fashion illustrator and it didn't coerce me into wearing makeup. i still do not wear it.

my Dragon taught me about sex and making love. i had three children, one of whom had died, and i knew nothing about sex. i’m not going into it other than to laud my Dragon. for him, with him, because of him, i did it right. making love with him was exciting and i was allowed to instigate. he rejoiced when i gave him my trust. he was in a quiet rage at the scars under my clothes but he never scared me with it. he told me those scars were not my fault. he accepted what i looked like because he saw more than my shell. and we did it like, well, like rabbits. i was trying to make up for lost time and he was more than willing and quite happy to…. let's leave it that his appetite for me matched mine for him.

he loved me. i was important just because i was breathing. i had been born and for the first time, that was a good thing.

he protected me and i’ll never have that again. not in this life.

i read in one book that, “one day, he will become a wonderful memory of a wonderful time in your life.”

he is a memory now and putting a label on him – “good memory” – and being set upon the path of relegating him to my past as a “wonderful time” in my life demeans what he meant to me and what he gave me. my life, my whole situation was out of the ordinary and what he did for me, how much he loved me, can’t be put in a box. what is it about death that makes people want to label it, put it in a box, and put it away on a shelf in the closet so they can “get on with their lives?” why do people expect that as the Golden Rule of Grief? there should be no rules or expectations that are supposed to be applied universally. i am getting on with my life but that includes thinking about, continuing to love, and missing my husband.

and for probably the first time in my entire life, and you’d have to really be privy to some delicate knowledge, i will not apologize for loving him and missing him. in honor of my Dragon and all the kickass things he did, i am not going to apologize for keeping my torch for him lit.

i have failed at so many things in my life, daughter, sister, first wife, friend, and at the widow’s group. each failure hurt deeply but i have the knowledge that i did not fail in loving my Dragon. i love him so very much. i miss him deeply. he talked to me and i got to talk to him. we valued each other. i was seen. no one saw me like that. i have never registered for long on anyone's screen. now that he’s gone, i am gone. i am the same person but without an advocate. i do not have him beside me gazing at me lovingly. i am not noticed in stores. “Excuse me” doesn’t draw a single bit of attention to me. i am back under the control of the “Umbrella Corporation,” as it were. i plead. i receive. i work. i market myself. i wait for commissions.

pass that bit of information around, please.

see that face? see how serious i am? see that anxious expression? i can do so much more than the Memory Quilts. www.renaissanceartist.webs.com go to the photo gallery. i can do very pretty things.

i need the VA to hurry. i need more work. i need to escape this “Raccoon City-esque” life i’m back in with He Who Shall Not Be Named.

i want my Dragon. oh, God, miss him.

he protected me. i can’t get that back. for years i protected my children. i deflected rage onto myself while trying to find someone who believed in my theory of masks and men who look like choirboys but are not.

one of the widows from the group called me on February 9^th. i had not heard from her since before Thanksgiving. i picked up only because she had called from a different number or i would have ignored her call. she has told me i am her last resort, back up buddy. she wanted me to talk to her because all her friends were busy and she was suddenly missing her husband. he’s been gone now for over three years and “you just don’t know what it’s like for them to be gone so long. the third year is worse than all the others.” she wondered why i wasn’t talking enough to her and i told her, “today is the first year anniversary of my husband’s death and i have been crying all day.”

her reply? “That’s nothing. Try three years. I’m really down and ……..”

yes, you have deduced correctly. i hung up on her and added that number under her name to ignore.

“The death of a husband gives the new widow a chance to fulfill her dreams in a new life, free, happy with the memories of her husband but ready for her new life that is being born.”

i started laughing when i read this. who knows what this woman’s marriage was like for her husband’s death to warrant this bit of insight. if it had been my first husband, i have to admit i could have gone along with it but i would never had said it out loud. i cannot disparage someone who would not be able to defend himself. the level and type of grief depends upon the relationship. my relationship with my Dragon was different so my message is different.

i am who i am. i lived and tried to fulfill my dreams, reach for love, and leave a legacy of some kind however small. if i am not who i started out to be, i cannot go back to that girl. i don’t want to. she didn’t know the Dragon. she never knew love.

i have had a nothing life that i have only survived. my legacy is my children and my art.

if anyone looks at the signature on my work, it is not my name. it is explained on my website. if they forget me, then that signature will end up being a mystery. but not to the eternal energy that will outlast us all.

i love my husband. i am not “getting over” his loss quickly. when i have the money, i am going to buy myself a widow’s ring from a website i found. thirty-eight dollars. it’s not much but to me that’s about four or five meals. but i will get it. i want it. for some reason to me it feels like a statement. in my head i hear, “back the f*ck off, you f*ckers. i love my husband and i am grieving for him. he saved me. he loved me. so f*ck off.” yes, i have a breaking point. i can get mad. however, what i'll say is, "yes, i am a widow." that's all they get.

i still love him and i believe he still loves me. death does not end a relationship but transforms it into something on another level. i’m living in two worlds. i’m alive here and working, making quilts, asking for more. but i am looking at the sky, at the sun and stars and at the moon. he’s up there. he’s waiting for me.

i am not who i was meant to be because he died. i am a reflection of what i could have been. he saw me and i was part of the world. now i am a ghost because i am not seen as a person. i am talked down to or not spoken to at all. my few friends are virtual. my life is in a small apartment. i live mostly in my head with fantasies of an island, of my Dragon, and of the moon.

16 July 1969 ~ NASA

North Pole moon ~ unknown

when i lost him, i lost me. i’m like a kite whose string has been let go. my Dragon died and the string was dropped. i’m on my own journey and i don’t know what i’ll see but i know i’ll never be seen again like i was by him.

he saw me. he was mine. i lived a whole lifetime of love in just eight years. i am his widow. i’ll never be the same.