Oh yes it was true and then it's 2 and a half years later...

He does seem corny, sweet and witty and....dead.

First, relief, for some time, and exhaustion.  Each day a blur of intention followed quickly by full physical and psychological torpor.  This lasted a long time, close to six months.  I didn't cry much, I didn't long for his bed body comfort, nor sob into the pillows.  Some of it was the end of my torture, really; what passes for caring for your best friend and lover as he diminishes, slowly drifting away, unable to mourn his loss for his real urgent need to be cared for and loved flexibly, adapting minute by minute every hour, every day. 

I tell you that my loss has gotten worse.  I bawl, have terrifying anger flares, fear of the long dark lonely night, death by sleeping.  Alone.

Not that these grief emotions were sequential; how do you stop the pain of grief?  Beer, every other day with ibuprofin the next, and often flickering visions of alternate realities, contradictory futures and manufactured pasts.  

Each day I formulate new lists with no priority.  Grocery, storage items, to do, ah water color painting, ah find a cause, ah make a purchase.  Monday, Wednesday, Saturday Jazzercise class, then shower then what, bird feeding, cooking, present buying? Where is my will, where is my other leg, my grounding, my balance? Where is my center?  My home, my confidant, my buddy in crime? My best friend ever, 43 years of 70? 

Where is joy, laughter, release of tension, of deep grave sorrow.

It does get worse, the extreme dissolving of self without other.  The desolation is impossible to describe; it withers me, bleakness, heartache, solitude inside me.

Carey competes his loss with mine.  Well, I loved my father, and I loved my mother.  Her suicide angered me so that I couldn't forgive her for abandoning my father in his last hospitalization and death (Merry Christmas Ray.). Drove me around the bend, to therapy and feel good pills.  

I understand abandonment now Carey; it hurts so much.  

 And I'm glad he's dead too.  I was the caregiver, the willing participant in the so long and painful, erratic and infuriating end of his life.  He stopped living, humorously, aggravatingly, stubbornly, four months before he died.  (Dungeness crab December 2020)

I guess it does help to say in in written words.  It can't hurt more.

November  2023

The Gal Gourmet Grief Group met today; I brought salmon in Maple Syrup.  I am so grateful to be within this fascinating, vital and funny group, the widow honeymooner, our AI pilot, the policeman's wife who lost her best friend, old soul widow, and the Irish hoot widow, everybody's favorite landscape designer, me, and Maria. 

The talk is shared life.  All the joys and tribulations of this time and place, here in privileged, climate safe for now until the big one, gay and sorrowful, divided and bounty born USA.  Mostly 50 ish, all female, so smart.  

 Now there's new loves, and the sweetness of time, working on our lives.  My cross country Careyvanventure, now Oregon Painted Hills and Crater Lake and oh so many trips to the sea.  Now there's Gene, and Carey has girlfriends, and who knows possibilities as the world devolves into chaos and war, into climate emergency, into fear and pain and just those regular days of exercise and standard kindness. 

 Who knows?