News from the Great Beyond

Memories and Haunting Songs

I've been loading my 3-disc CD player the last few days with CDs that I haven't listened to in ages... tonight a particularly haunting tune jumped out at me from the Lost Dogs CD "Little Red Riding Hood".

The song struck me because I've been hearing a lot here lately about the sovereignty of God.  The statement's been made several times that we shouldn't question God, and the book of Job seems to point to the uselessness of questioning God (as I've mentioned before)... but I've also heard it said many times by many people I respect that God is big enough to handle our questions and our anger and our doubts.  He knows we have them anyway, so why do we try to stifle them instead of opening up that dialog and letting Him speak?

So without further ado, I searched for a video of the song and found one recorded live at Cornerstone festival 2006 (oh, that makes me miss Cornerstone... sooooo many memories there including a Lost Dogs concert of my own):   

Maybe I should just take a bath.

A couple of weekends ago my friend Anji was here visiting from Michigan, and I spent the night in her hotel room after a hilarious evening of games and memories and inside jokes...  We actually had a serious discussion about grief, during which she pretty much read my mind about all the unstated thoughts, doubts and even guilt that I'd had running around in my head.

She told me to expect that I'd cry in the shower and in the car, for weeks and months to come.  Because they're "safe", she said... and even then I was already experiencing that.  The car I've done better with, usually because I haven't been driving alone much.  But from day one, every time I've taken a shower, I've found myself weeping.  Something about the water I guess, it's a catalyst.

Musings... On Categorizing the Pain

Since I've been back sleeping under my own roof, most days have been "productive" ones - accomplishing some of the cleaning and organizing that had been sadly lacking over the last way-too-long and sorting through the multiple piles of Hubby-head's clothing (the man never got rid of anything, I swear) for Goodwill donations.  My 9-year-old nephew is here with my best friend/sister-in-law, and he's been fairly well bored out of his skull... so after we dropped my mom off at the airport yesterday morning we decided to give all of us a break and have a "fun day".

The vast majority of yesterday was spent in the swimming pool at my complex (I finally got a copy of the pool fence key from the HOA after nearly 11 years in residence >.<).   We'll all be sporting a bit of sunburn today but the SPF 50 waterproof sunblock hopefully spared us the worst of it.  We got back to my condo around 10:30, put the li'l guy to bed, and then gave ourselves a coffee boost so we could stay up and enjoy some girl time, watching a movie that was fun for us but child-inappropriate.  I slipped into bed beside the snoozing nephew around 1:30 AM.

Sometime in the hours between 5:30 AM and 7:15, when I finally gave up on sleeping because the cats just would not stop doing annoying or noisy things (*heavy sigh*), this germ of a thought popped into my orderly blogger-brain.

Happy Birthday to Me

It's been two weeks and obviously the loss is still raw.  I wake up every morning now, in my own bed, with a sense of wrongness.

This is my home - but something's off... something fundamental and profound... something major is missing.

So today as I cross that slippery slope from "mid-30's" to "late 30's" I can already tell how different this birthday is.  The cats woke me up in the pre-6AM hour and instead of my hunny-bunny waking up next to me and giving me a big birthday kiss, my best friend shushed them and turned over to go back to sleep.

Hubby and I were supposed to have been teaching the junior high class at church this morning... then out for a nice lunch and perhaps later tonight he'd have taken me to the Melting Pot for a ridiculously expensive but romantic meal.  The requisite birthday nookie would have been on the agenda at some point, and I'm willing to bet there would have been something else thoughtful and sweet - an e-card or chocolate or movie.  Plans for today, I'm sure, were already being made seventeen days ago when my world collapsed.

Instead, my best friend and I will go to church - my mom, currently asleep on my couch, will stay home to prepare for her flight back to St. Louis tomorrow.  My brother will stop by and go to dinner with us... my task for the day is deciding where I want to go.

Decisions have never been my strong suit, and today they hurt a bit too much.

Broken

On Monday, my newly rebuilt computer (souped up everything except with the same old hard drive for convenience) handed me a Blue Screen of Death and refused to turn back on again.

Last night my nephew wanted to watch a DVD, and for the life of me I couldn't get the DVD player to work - he (the techie in training) and his mom also tried to help figure it out and we finally gave up.

This morning he wanted to watch cartoons while we got ready for the errands of the day - and I couldn't make the cable work either.

Everything's breaking it seems... the computer... the TV... my heart... and the one guy who's qualified to make it all good again is gone.

Gone.

I can get a friend from church to look at my computer and hopefully bring it back to life.  My brother could probably push a few buttons and make the TV and DVD player behave again.  Some things that are broken just can't be fixed that easily. 

Thank you for your continued prayers and support.

Held

This song's been on my heart today... it used to make me cry when I first heard it, and I sought it out today for comfort in the midst of this storm.

Just How It Is

Mornings are the worst right now.  Right now, at least, with my mom and my best friend staying with me, supporting me, with things to accomplish every day and still not yet sleeping in my own home.

In the mornings, I find myself weeping in the shower, knowing my day is full and my life as I knew it is irrevocably changed.  I had a life before I met my sweetheart.  I'll have a life to live from here on out - it's just that I can't imagine it ever being satisfying again after the last 7 years, surrounded by love and joy.

As the day goes on I get involved in conversation, in action, in hard work... and I'm able to laugh and enjoy the company of those who love me.  I went shopping with my mom yesterday, helping her pick out new clothes for the first time in years.  One of my closest friends, who now lives in Michigan, was in town over the weekend and I laughed harder than I have in years having a "girl's night" full of swimming, games, and chatter.  There are good times, for sure.

I sleep well, although not as comfortably as I would in my own bed... but in the morning there's this heaviness that persists through my shower and into the early part of the day.

And at home, on my computer, there's this little constant reminder.  Hubby and I both used Trillian for instant messaging (combining AIM, ICQ, Yahoo Messenger and MSN so we can talk to friends that only use one of the 4 without having multiple programs open)... and although his boss cleared out his personal belongings from his office for me, he didn't turn off his computer. 

He's still logged into Trillian, and every time I look at my IM buddy list, I see "Hubby-Head", as if I could just shoot him an IM in heaven and have him send me back some kissy faces and tell me he loves me.  That's what I'll miss the most.

More Than I Am

(As promised months ago... this is a poem I wrote just after Christmas this past year.)

Once again I find myself at the confluence of worlds
Dazzled by the brilliance of Your beauty,
the simplicity of Your grace
I see in the glimmer of stars fragments of
who You are and all I could become

Yet mired in self, the inertia, procrastination and pride,
my feet are powerless to step into that light
weighed down with the burden of good intentions
broken promises and deferred dreams

I see You there, so close
cheering me on to step across this next divide,
reach up one more time to a higher plateau

So exquisitely simple, yet excruciating it is
to die this one more time
I have this fear of falling
I know my arms are too weak to push beyond this gap

I need Your help to be
more than I am

den 28 dec 07

Another Perspective

I love my mom's pastor.  If I felt that my place was to be in that part of the country, he'd be my pastor in a heartbeat.  Their church is dedicating a memorial garden to my hubby-head to be planted this fall, and their love and prayers have been a large part of what's been supporting me these days.

God's timing amazes me sometimes.  For months now their church had planned the sermon topic for today: grief and loss.  Featured as part of the service was a reading from their pastor's blog (he's currently on sabbatical).  I'll have to re-read this over the next several days to fully digest it... but here it is for your perusal as well.

Surreality

The alarm went off at 7:00 AM and I sat up in a stranger's master bedroom, next to my mother.  I got up quickly and showered to get it out of the way because today is a big day.

Today is the day we go back to my real life to say goodbye forever.

This is not my life.  What was supposed to happen this morning, what happens nearly every Thursday morning, is that I was supposed to sleep through Anastasia waking Hubby-head up at 6:00 AM (or 5:30, or 5:00, depending on how demanding she decides to be) to give her canned food.  I was supposed to hear the shower going about 6:30 and have Hubby shake my arm about 7:00 to tell me he was on his way to work and give me a kiss goodbye.  We were supposed to go through our silly, sweet goodbye ritual, and then I was supposed to have to decide if I wanted to get up or catch another hour or two of sleep, depending on how late I stayed up.

Alternately, I might have slept until I woke up without Hubby saying goodbye, and I'd know that as soon as I sat up and put on my glasses I could look through the angle of the bedroom door and see him sitting behind his computer in the living room, and I'd know it was a work-at-home day.  Work-at-home days were my favorite because I could go hug and kiss on him any time, I'd brew a full pot of coffee for us to share and he'd run out and pick up lunch for both of us and we could spend a lot of time together and still get his business done.

We spent a lot of time together, just me and the hubby.  Homebodies... sufficient unto ourselves.  We loved our home, loved being with each other and our kitties.  We saw our friends at church, occasionally went to gatherings, out to eat, movies or ballgames, traveled to see family and out-of-state friends... but mostly it was us, at home, and we liked it that way.  That was my life.  It's not for everybody, but it was for me.