One Hundred Weeks of Numbness and Pain and Joy

Preface Warning:  This blog entry may be difficult for some to read.  It’s okay, I understand.  It isn’t the easiest to write.  If you have stress and anxiety triggered by talk of suicide, stop here. 

One hundred weeks.  I can’t believe it’s been 100 weeks.  How can that be, when some days it seems like it was yesterday and other days it feels like it was a lifetime ago?  How did we get here? 

Some might say I shouldn’t think like this, in terms of weeks or months or days, but I don’t think it’s all that weird.  I think it’s more common than people think when you lose your person, your other half, your soulmate.  I’ve also realized that as time passes, I seem to do it less consciously than I did, but somehow my subconscious mind always has the clock ticking, keeping score. 

In week one, I was in a fog, still in shock and disbelief.  I kept thinking I was going to wake up and all the people in my house would be gone, your patrol car would still be in the driveway, and you would still be here; I kept thinking that it was all a bad dream. 

By the fourth week, we’d already had your service and life was back to “normal”, at least for everyone else.  I was back at work and trying my best, but I was beginning to realize that it wasn’t working.  I spent more time on the couch or in the bed than I did at my computer, but I was numb.  I cried, sure, but not like I would in the coming weeks and months.  I had no idea what lay ahead, and I think that’s good.  If I had, I’m not sure I could have faced it.  Abby and I were both in therapy. 

Twelve weeks afterward, Abby and I had taken a couple of trips to see the McKees in Georgia, and we were falling into a routine of sorts.  She seemed to be doing much better than I was, but I wasn’t going to let her see that.  I would wait until she was on the bus before crawling back into bed or onto the couch and sobbing, as the numbness that came early on was beginning to wear off.  The tears were a near constant at this point: I cried while driving the car, grocery shopping, doing laundry, going to bed, waking up, showering, and even while kayaking. 

Suddenly, twenty weeks had crept up on us.  I was eating nothing but comfort food and carbs, and I had stopped cooking.  It seemed as though the Autopilot switch that had kept me sort of functional those first weeks and months had finally given out.  I was eating a lot of Marie Callender’s Chicken Pot Pies over rice by then.  I was on a cocktail of antidepressants and anti-anxiety meds with some melatonin thrown in to help me sleep, even though sleep was fitful at best.  Nightmares had become my new reality.  It seemed that 3 AM was the witching hour because that was the time I would be jerked awake by the sound of the shot, the vision of you laying in that creekbed, and the sound of my own screams.

I’d started trying out all sorts of holistic and metaphysical stuff in an effort to feel less sad.  I started burning white sage and lavender incense in my room at night, hoping that sleep would come.  Float therapy became a bi-weekly part of my life.  Meditation, both guided and non-guided, crystals, my Tibetan Singing Bowl.  I guess I went a little bit hippie dippy, but I think it helped.

When I did finally get to sleep, I usually could sleep through the night, but not without laying there for hours before, replaying the events of that last day in my head over and over again…  searching.  I was searching for answers that would never come, and although on some level I knew that, I still searched…  for clues that I had missed, for the moment when you made the decision to take that final walk, for all of it.  I felt like I was stuck on repeat play, but I wasn’t because the clock kept ticking, even if the song never changed.

Twenty-one

Twenty-two

Twenty-three

And finally…  forty-four.  We’d made it through Christmas and your birthday, and New Year’s was quickly approaching.  We’d spent Christmas on a cruise, so I didn’t have to decorate or try to make it memorable.  The fact that we were on a cruise made it memorable enough.  The fact that you weren’t with us made it memorable for different reason…  this was the after that grief books talk about.  My life is divided into two parts – before we died and after we died.  I say “we” because although I am still here, I still breathe, a part of me also died in those woods alongside you that day.  I miss her and I mourn her, just like I miss you and mourn you.  Still, the weeks pass until…

We made it a year.  It’s easier to say a year than it is to say fifty-two weeks.  No one has to think when they hear “a year”, whereas fifty-two weeks requires at least some thought.  Mom and Dad were here, even though Dad was just a couple of months out from a hip replacement.  They came up because they didn’t want me to be alone.  I was glad for that.  I needed them here.  We ended up having a Mardi Gras party that weekend, and that made for a fun time with a lot of Grubby stories (Man, did you leave some good ones!).  Dad even got the baby in the King Cake! 

Everyone told me that the second year was harder than the first.  I guess in the first year, we know the “firsts” are coming: first birthday without you, first anniversary without you, first Christmas without you, first vacation without you.  I planned things to do during the firsts – things we had not done together – just to have something different to remember whatever first it was.  It’s not just us that are aware that it’s a first: our friends and family remember too, and in some ways, they try to soften those dates for us.  Our minds try to numb them for us.  I remember on the one month mark, at about noon, I couldn’t keep my eyes open.  I went and laid down, and the next thing I knew it was 2:30.  My body knew that I needed to sleep through the exact time that you died to protect me from the overwhelming pain.  So, I went into the second year not really knowing what to expect.

I began to think in months instead of weeks, unless it was a milestone number like today.  I kept doing the hippie dippy shit.  I don’t know if it was working but it wasn’t hurting, and at this point, my float therapy gives me something to look forward to.  If nothing else, I might get a little nap in the pod, and I always meet up for lunch with John afterward.

I went ahead with our pool project, and I spent some time nearly every day in it as we went into the late spring and summer, months fifteen and sixteen. I need water and the pool makes me happy. “And into the water I go to lose my mind and find my soul.”  Abby and I continued to travel: cruising to Bermuda and going to Johnson City and the Lake.  I also got more involved with Blue Help.  I went to Police Week, even though they didn’t honor you.  I went so that I could help honor you by representing Blue Help and sharing our story with officers and families alike as they stopped by our tent. 

At 17 months, I visited a medium in the hopes that you would come through and you did.  I needed that, but you already knew that I needed it.  My mind has been haunted with doubts and fears, and you helped me by relieving some of that when you came through.  You answered some questions that I didn’t even know I had.  I will visit again in the upcoming months to see if you come through again.  I still need you; you know.

We’ve made it through all but one of the seconds, and we’re here… at a hundred weeks.  Just another month and it will be the second observance of that awful, awful day.  I refuse to refer to it as an anniversary; those are supposed to be celebrated.  Instead, I call it an observance.  Yes, we will observe it, but we will not celebrate it.  I haven’t figured out what we are going to do this year.  That weekend is the weekend before Mardi Gras again this year, so I’m thinking about doing another Mardi Gras party.  This year, I might do something specific in memory of you.  I’ve got an idea anyway.

For today, though, I am staying in, cuddling the Pugs, and protecting my heart from the realization that we are at another milestone, that we have been without you for a hundred weeks…