I thought I had started to live again. This week showed me I’m still just trying to survive.
It’s Halloween, my favorite holiday. I’m sitting here drinking apple cider mixed with gin that Don and I bought on vacation, crying for the 800th time this week, this time because of the end of Hocus Pocus, when (spoiler alert) McGee from NCIS rejoins his sister in heaven and tells the girl from American Beauty that he’ll always be with her.
This was my birthday weekend, and the first time I’ve ever dreaded my own birthday. Some people might find it normal to dread your birthday. But not me. I love birthdays. Especially my own. I love the concept of just celebrating your arrival on this earth, and other people making you feel special just because they’re happy you were born.
People did that for me this weekend. Just not the one who promised to spend his life making me feel special every day.
I went away with some of my girls this weekend, to an Airbnb in Virginia. We drank wine, met a baby goat, decided to adopt the Airbnb host as our grandmother, and learned how to use a bug-zooka. It was fun, and relaxing, and I cried a lot. I told the girls why they and their husbands should have wills in place. I watched my wedding video for the first time and it was tragically perfect.
I cried at everyone wishing me a happy birthday on Facebook. The idea that this birthday could be a happy one was preposterous, so completely ridiculous that I laughed bitterly while I cried.
I had dinner on Sunday night with my family and Tony (my port in a storm, grief and trauma partner in crime, and substitute husband). I saw in my parents’ eyes how badly they wished Don were there too.
As I drove home that night, “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” by Iz came on my Pandora station. I often envision Don speaking to me through music, and that is a song that had a lot of meaning to him and his mother. And I lost it. Sobbed all the way home, in the elevator and into my apartment, as I fed the cats and collapsed into bed. Started texting Tony some pretty high-maintenance grief SOS, and he handled it like a champ.
And then again the next night. This time Tony got the full blast in person, as I cried and asked unfair, unanswerable questions like what’s the point of living if I’m just going to be this sad the rest of my life.
Tony deserves a medal for talking me out of my tree, telling me he has faith in me, even when I don’t have faith in myself. And that all we can do is live one day at a time.
He’s here. I’m here. Some days that’s the most we can do. And that’s an accomplishment in itself.
The next few months will be an emotional shitshow, as my wedding anniversary comes up next month, and then the holidays, and then the anniversary of his death in January. And then I have to do it all again. And again.
Life is hard. It will always be hard. But I have Tony. I have my friends. I have my family. I have the cats.
I’ll close this lament with a quote that Don posted on Facebook a few years ago. As always, he has the perfect words to encapsulate the joy and tragedy that is this life.
No words will shut the sky of a storm, bring peace in a time when what matters is wrong, or shine sun in the night where the darkness is strong, and neither can they, the words of this song. But still, write them we try through our prose or a poem, despite that we don't know the depth of such loss, and beside you in spirit wherever the road of this suffering leads your friends take hand and roam.
I love you, friend.
Happy belated birthday. The next few months are going to be rough. We believe in you, just like Tony does, and your parents do, and your friends do, and Don does. We all love you dearly.