Surviving Year Two: Week 5

Confused Mermaid

This is Week 5 of my Surviving Year Two Grief Project. Details about all my Grief Projects, as well as Grief Resources can be found here.

Chaotic confusion. Divine moments. Upside-down world. This is what Week 5 of my second year as a widow has felt like. My dark four-day weekend of the soul last week was bad enough for me to ask for help. A kind friend gifted me with some remote psychic healing work, which will happen later today. I am desperate for healing. 

A friend is having a Bauhaus-inspired(!) 50th birthday party and I have been trying to put together a costume for it. This was the realm of my late husband and I have broken down so many times in tears while trying to craft it. He loved helping me craft, giving me his feedback, and even making a quick run to the craft store for me. Costumes were one of his passions and trying to make one on my own makes the loneliness crash in around me.

The loneliness is unbearable at times. Living in grief every day has a kind of brutal loneliness I have never experienced before, and I'm an only child who grew up shy and alone for most of my childhood. 

Part of that brutal loneliness is my desperation for touch. I used to be touched, kissed and hugged every single day, by a big, handsome man who loved me. Now I just pick up the crumbs that are thrown at me — a hug after a dinner date, a kiss on the cheek from a friend, the touch of the chiropractor on my shoulder. I greedily fall into these moments of touch, trying to memorize the feeling so that I can pull it up in my mind when I am crying alone in the night. Honestly, the lack of physical touch is probably the hardest, most brutal part of surviving year two as a sudden widow.

While I'm glad to have this project and a way to check in with myself and all of you, every week, it doesn't have the same impact as my daily grief project. This makes me sad, but I don't know what else to do right now, so I'm going to keep doing this.

Thank you for witnessing me. See you next week.