Today is my third wedding anniversary.
It's never an easy day- I've never celebrated it as an anniversary as such. How can I- the person I should celebrate it with isn't here. I recognise it as the day we got married, the day we moved to the hospice. The beginning of the end.....
Grief, I think we can all agree, is a bitch. It's your own personal demon, affecting you whenever you least expect, pulling the rug out from under you whenever it can. 'It gets easier,' I hear you say.... fuck that. No it doesn't. You get better at dealing with it, sure, and you can (if you're lucky) recognise and have coping mechanisms,s in place for when you need to deal with when it's put you on your arse for the umpteenth time..... but easier? no.
If anything, for me, the longer time passes the harder the grief is. Every time I reach another anniversary, another milestone, I'm just reminded of how difficult, how lonely it is now without him. It's like carrying something heavy and trying to get on with what you are doing, but being constantly interrupted so you need to shift the weight, add to it, change course; getting used to the new weight feels like starting all over again.
Because of course, what they fail to warn you about is that grief brings other feelings as well. Obviously we all know of the five stages of grief, even if we are unprepared for when they hit us (hint; its not necessarily the order you think it should be) but it brings so many others as well.
Like guilt.
Oh the guilt. This one has been hitting hard recently. It can seem little at first- you get rid of some items and feel guilty for letting go of those memories, you go about your day and realise you haven't thought about them.... and then it starts to creep further, hit you harder. On Tomas's last birthday I put up a post saying 'I have an 11 year old' rather than 'we have.....', and spent a week beating myself up for forgetting Martin in that moment, for this new stage of living without him. Leaving him in Argentina, whilst the right thing to do, has kept me up at night since my return more times than I care to admit- I left him, like I don't care if my husband is with me or not. I left him behind like he wasn't important, like it didn't matter where he was. I left him, like want to forget that part of my life and his remains were holding me back.
I feel guilt for everything. Every new moment in the kids lives- guilt. Everytime I curse him for not being here in anger (every Tuesday night when the bins need to go out)- guilt. Everytime I get into stupid situations, lose my shit, know that he would have handled it better- guilt. It'e not enough that I have to live without him, I have to feel guilty that I'm not enough without him. That I'm not there for the kids, that I'm not working enough, doing enough.
I feel guilty for not insisting he went to the doctor sooner, not forcing him to go. I feel guilty for not reminding him about the miracles of suncream. I feel guilty for every argument, every cross word, every time I should have apologised and didn't. I feel guilty for all the things I can't make right, for all the times I should have been kinder......
I feel guilty that I am here, and he is not.
And I know these thoughts, intrusive and dark and suffocating as they are, serve no purpose other than to take away from all the steps taken in surviving grief; all they do is take away the happiness, keep everything in a grey limbo, a forest of emotion where it's impossible to see your way through the trees. The idea that I should remain sad forever, that I should never move on.... its unfeasible and yet comforting, easier to stay wrapped in the past than struggle towards the future.
And it is a struggle. I miss him with every fibre of my being. His voice on the phone, awkwardly saying 'love you' at the end of phone calls as he always found it embarrassing but would say it anyway. His habit of leaving his boxers in the shower. The look on his face when he'd see the kids. The comfortable silence sharing mate in the mornings, relaxing in the evenings, laying together at night. I miss his cooking, his kisses, the way he'd dance and sing in the house with all of us.
I miss him.
Martin would always say, 'live your life.' I know he would tell me to stop being so
hard on myself, to get on with it and carry on. He would want the three of us to be happy, to not sit and wallow in limbo when there's nothing we can do to change the past.
Grief is the fucking worst. and the guilt that clouds with it just sucks...... But clouds don't stay. they come, and they go, and you deal with the weather and the weight of what you carry and hope for brighter days. And I know they will come, because even on the coldest of days, the sun still shines. I will spend today with those I love, I will focus on the job I adore, and the sun will shine. Moving on, moving forward.... it's nothing to feel guilty about.
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