Tuesday, February 25, 2014

Almost a year...

Tuesday, February 25, 2014

This Friday, it will have been a year since Gery died. What I thought was the worst day of my life wasn't - that was actually his funeral, which was March 4, 2013. I still don't have the right words to describe the feelings. I love(d) him, but we were having problems. I can say now that I'm pretty sure they were symptoms of his brain tumor. That doesn't make it hurt less that in the second half of our marriage, I felt like we should be separating and divorcing and that we were staying together out of comfort, habit, and the promises we'd made to God and each other and to Sarah.

I am still, at times, desperately sad and lonely. I am also, at times, able to forget that I am a widow and the mother of a fatherless child. Sometimes Sarah talks about Gery and I'm so happy she has those memories - things they did together, things he made for her, places we went together as a family. Sometimes, she's a very normal 5 (almost 6) year old, and she says things like, "This line is so long that I wish I was dead like Daddy," and I don't know how to respond. She's 5. She knows death. But she's 5 and in her world, nothing is forever. She says forever but she doesn't know that it means he is never. coming. back. Never. Never again. There will be no new memories. And I fear that she'll forget him, and so even though it still hurts a lot to talk about him, I do so that she can remember him. If not through her eyes, through mine.

I'm kind of bouncing around like a pinball. (Pinball analogies? That's what I do now? I was always annoyed by the time the pinball machines took up. I wanted him to do things for and with me and (later) Sarah.) I moved across the state but I'm homesick and want to go back. But I don't want to go back to our house. I want to go to Erie. The next minute, I want to go to somewhere else. What I think I'm missing is that there is no place where I will feel comfortable in my own skin. I've been able to grow where I was planted in every other circumstance in my life, but (to follow the metaphor) my roots have been torn off and my leaves are shredded.

Talk about your terrible writing. I'm a pinball and a plant? Sooner or later I'll be able to write well again, too.