You Got Me

Here we are. Thanksgiving week. Work for me is done, Q is out of school, my parents will be here tomorrow.

I jokingly refer to every visit from family as a mental health check. I get it. Everyone is waiting for me to completely lose my mind. it hasn’t happened (yet). We still have to make it through this week. Pray for us.

Add to the pile of “stuff that is hard about being a widow”- doing everything alone. Matt was my person. He was more than my husband, he was the person I told everything to. I also asked his opinion on everything. Whether I took his advice or not is a different story entirely, but I loved having someone to bounce everything off of.

I have been avoiding a lot of things since Matt died in August. I have been avoiding the fact that we have to figure out what to do with the house. I’ve been avoiding purging and getting ready for the inevitable move. I still cannot even walk into Verizon to shut off his phone. I can’t make myself do it. I know I will have to force myself to but for now I just avoid it.

It’s hard to make big decisions alone. I find that I have to just do it and rip it off like a bandaid because if I overthink it and dwell on it I drive myself crazy. I feel like everything I’m doing is to make our lives easier right now, but I have to think longterm.

I wish so badly I could talk to him and ask him what he wants us to do. Not about anything specific, but about everything. Whenever I was terrified to do something he was always the person that pushed me way out of my comfort zone and helped me make the scary decisions. He wasn’t scared of much. He believed that every decision led you to where you were supposed to be anyway. I wish I had a dollar for every time he said “Stop overthinking it and just do it, Sparkles’. Oh, Dimples. I wish I had recorded that for the hard times.

I feel like I’m stuck in a cycle of saying to myself “Ok, Self. How can we get through this one day” so when something big happens I internally freak out because it’s really hard to look ahead when the day to day seems so difficult.

I know that not sleeping isn’t helping at all. I feel like I could sleep for a year and and not be caught up.

Aside from the obvious trauma from losing my 35 year old husband to stage 4 colon cancer, trying to live without him and let life go on around me is killing me slowly. Our marriage wasn’t perfect. We could make each other so mad but we always forgave and we loved each other. I can walk into a room full of people I know and just want to be invisible. I can be around a room full of strangers and not make eye contact with a single one.

I lost my person.

I love the feeling of having someone to catch me when I fall back. I want to know that I have someone looking out for me. Because sometimes I’m just too sleep deprived to look out for myself. I don’t want to go home to an empty house every day. I don’t want to wonder if I did everything I could’ve done to keep him here. I wasn’t to know for sure that there was nothing else that could’ve saved him. And I am a strong independent woman who don’t need no man, but can we all just stop trying to pretend that sleeping alone is awesome?

Because it is not awesome. I miss sleeping with my person every night.

Gavin Degraw was one of Matt’s favorite people. This song reminds me of him.

“When the fear takes you down, when the doubt takes you under

When you sink like a stone, and you can’t breathe

When the tears take control

When the demons take over

Won’t be in this alone

You got me”

On nights like tonight when I cannot physically force myself to go home to an empty house, this song playing in my ears while I drown out the man tapping loudly at Starbucks is helping me along.

cancer sucks.

Our last Christmas card as a family. Punches me right in the throat.