Surviving Year Two: Week 4

Forever Alone

This is Week 4 of my Surviving Year Two Grief Project. Details about all my Grief Projects, as well as Grief Resources can be found here.

It's a long holiday weekend. While I am happy to have four days off of work, I am also feeling the deep, echoing emptiness of my life. My husband was the kind of person who always knew what was going on. He had a huge community of friends and every weekend, he always had about 20 different parties, events and happenings we could go to. He'd always know about the weird parties, out in the middle of a field, or the guy who lets you sit in his hot springs on Sunday mornings (but only if you brought him beer). Sometimes he'd have a performance and be furiously sewing his newest costume before we would head to the city or the East Bay, so he could dance his "Bear-lesque" in some back-room bar.

Now he's gone and I am realizing that I do not have the friend network he had. Most of my friends are living a bit more "traditional" lives, where the weekends are more about entertaining their kids and having tame BBQ's. Don't get me wrong — I adore those kids and I love a good BBQ — but I so deeply miss the wildness that my husband brought to my life.

Yesterday, I was doing some leisurely grocery shopping, instead of my usual rushed lunch break grocery shopping, and I realized that I was surrounded by hurried Burning Man Trekkers, getting last minute supplies before they headed off to the Playa. My husband was a long-time Burner and all those RVs and giant bottles of water made me so viscerally miss him, I felt like someone had punched me in my guts. I started sobbing right there in the deli aisle as people stared at me and carefully walked around me.

I don't know how to bring that wildness back into my life, without him.

Thank you for witnessing me. See you next week.