6 Months of Grief Project: Day 152

11 Months Gone

This is Day 152 of my #6MonthsOfGrief Project. To learn more about this practice, feel free to visit Day One, where I explain this project in more detail.

Tonight, at midnight, he will have been gone for 11 months. This number makes no sense to me. In one month exactly, he will have been gone a year. Other widows have told me that the first anniversary passes relatively easily and quickly — that it's the two year anniversary that hits the hardest. I don't look forward to that, because this one is hard enough.

Today I hugged a friend who, while not as tall as my husband was, is still very tall and also has broad shoulders like my husband had. Before I even knew what hit me, I burst into tears. His hug was the closest I have felt to what it felt like to hug my husband and that deep, body feeling overwhelmed me. I miss my beloved's hugs. I miss his huge chest and his furry beard and his butterfly kisses on my eyelids. I miss his huge hands on my body. I miss the deep sighs he would make while he slept. I miss everything about him.

We were like two puzzle pieces that fit together perfectly. Now there is an empty hole where his piece used to fit inside me, and we no longer can create the bigger image of the sun, or the trees or the moon. Now I am just a confusing, solitary piece that makes no sense on her own. There is nowhere to fit me into the puzzle — into the greater image.

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I am very aware that this project can bring up a lot around yours or other's grief and loss, I will always follow every post with some online grief support resources that have helped me. Please feel free to let me know of online support that you have found healing in your grief, as well:

Art with Grief:

• Filmmaker Gemma Green Hope made a short animation in memory of her grandmother 
• Photographer Sarah Treanor Takes Moving Self-Portraits to Cope with Her Fiance's Death
• When the Fall Comes, a film about Grief by Adriana Marchione
• Self-Portraits: Expressing Emotion Through Art on What's Your Grief?
• The Hard Romance of Grief by Mark Liebenow
• The poetry of John O’Donohue

Resources for Widows:

• Open to Hope: Finding Hope After Loss
• Widowed Village
• Camp Widow

• Soaring Spirits International

Living with Grief Resources:

• What Joe Biden Has Said About Dealing With Personal Tragedy And Grief
• Death, Grief & Shattered Assumptions
• Stifled Grief: How the West Has It Wrong
• How Grief Can Make You Sick
• What's Your Grief?
• The Grief Geek
• Modern Loss's excellent resource list
• The writings of Tim Lawrence
• The Rules of Grief are for Other People by Shawn Doyle on The Good Men Project
• Grief Bibliography on Grief Healing
• Teresa “TL” Bruce's What to Say When Someone Dies
• They Brought Cookies: For A New Widow, Empathy Eases Death's Pain by Ann Finkbeiner on NPR
• A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit
• Megan Devine’s Refuge in Grief
• The Geography of Sorrow: Francis Weller on Navigating Our Losses, interviewed by Tim McKee in Sun Magazine
• How to Be a Friend in Deed by Bruce Feiler in the New York Times
• 12 Things to Know About the First Year of Grieving Someone You Can’t Live Without by Laurie Costanza in Elephant Magazine

And remember, I am sharing this project on a variety of platforms, including my Instagram, Twitter, & Facebook feeds, as well as my Pinterest page on Grief. I use the hashtag #6MonthsOfGrief, so it can easily be found on any platform. Please share this project with anyone you think might need it.

Thank you, and see you tomorrow.