It’s 4 years ago that I first started blogging about this whole circus that is my life.
Like back then, I’ve written this post on the notes section of my phone, mostly late at night, when I should be sleeping and instead, I'm pondering all sorts of things.
Right now though, those thoughts are: I think we are ok.
Back then I struggling to get my thoughts straight around triggering things and what has been and what is to come and, well, it’s seems not a lot has changed!
Except so much has.
I started writing the stuff in my brain in the very first instance to write out the replaying of the day and all the things that happened and all the things that were said and done on the day Pete died.
I remember it being in early April and that I had been replaying that day over and over and over in my head and some 10 or 12 weeks later having retold it to so many people, it was STILL playing in my head and people were still asking me about exactly what happened because people were still trying to wrap their heads around it, and someone had mentioned more than once that writing might help.
Writing, I could do.
In that first brain purge I expunged my brain of all the things I had lived through on January and I put every graphic the detail in it as I sat on our couch and typed through tears and shaking fingers as I recalled it all.
This served two purposes - it allowed me to put down on paper (as such) all of the details I had been replaying over and over and over in my brain in the vain hope that getting it out of my brain would stop it replaying in my brain … and it gave everyone the details they didn’t think they wanted to know but people had absolutely asked about.
It was brutal to read, apparently, but it also helped me. And for possibly the first time since Pete had died, I went to bed the night after I written it out of my head and it didn’t replay all night in my head. I crawled into my bed in a room that still contained all 4 of my children, and slept.
So I wrote a bit more down about the other stuff I'd had to do, like choose an outfit for the dead person to wear in coffin; choose a coffin; how to tell children their dad is dead; how you front up at a funeral for your husband; how you get out of bed; how frigging amazing my village humans can be…
It was easier than people think to write about. I just wrote all the things in my head out into a device and it got it out of my head. As the words came into my head, I typed them out in all of their typo- abs grammar-error filled ways just to get it all out of my head.
I didn't actually put it out of my brain and onto anything for anyone, except for me.
But I put it online to try and help people to understand how I was and what I was going through.
I had hoped putting it out there would help people understand how and why I did the things I did, how I made the decisions I did. Whether I was still mentally and rationally ok. And for the many many people who loved Pete and our family, it would give them a level of understanding of what I had and was dealing with , without having to call, or force me repeat myself many many times.
No one knew what the right things to do was - call me, not call me, ask me, not ask me... no one tells you what to do when someone young dies and how to deal with their wife and kids... we are all fairly ok with what to do with older people, but not young people and children.
For a lot of people it gave them an insight and understanding into what I had to do and they mostly appreciated it.
For some people, they couldn't read it. They couldn't handle reading about how hard things were. Standing on the outside and reading it and knowing they couldn't help me (and for lots of it, people couldn't) was too hard for them. That was ok.
For some, they didn't want to know.
Some complained to me they didn't like it.
But for me, for the last 4 years, my blog has served as a void into which I could yell (well, type).
Yell about the hard, about the unjustness, about the funny, the trying, the repetitiveness, mundane … and it was an empty vessel.
I didn't write it for a response. I wrote it for me. And maybe the kids, so they could read it and see I was trying.
But what happened, in lots of cases, was people appreciating an insight to my grief, which as a Western Society, we suck at disclosing.
The entire title 'The Failing Widow' was an irony on the fact everyone seemed to need to comment on what I was doing that was out of what was considered 'ordinary' for a widow.
When pressed, no one could tell me what a widow looked or acted like, least of all a young widow, or a younger widow with 4 young kids ... but they felt that going and getting coffee the week my husband died, or buying school shoes for kids so they could get to school, wasn't it ... either was continuing to do the things we had always done, trying to maintain normality, keeping structure for the kids, leaving the house, smiling and laughing, not obviously (on the outside) falling apart and being non-functional.
For the most part, thanks largely due to some Western polite society and Hollywood conditioning, I did think I was failing at it... back in the beginning I couldn't seem to make anything better, to fix it.
Four years after I began to write all this stuff out, I have read back over some of the things I have written.
The upside of having this time capsule of my thoughts is I can see how far I have come from those very early months… and how close some of those feelings remain.
I read some of those early posts and it's almost triggering, transporting me straight back to that place and time and feeling, and the hurt and hard and everything that went with it.
But at the same time, I can now look at it and think: holy smokes I recognise that broken person … I think it gets hard now, but it’s nothing compared to what it was back then.
And I can look at what I’ve written knowing that I still got to here… even though I can absolutely still sit my backside in the corner and whine ‘but why is it STILL so hard…’ and wallow in the quicksand of self pity.
I still continue to be utterly perplexed and sideswiped by grief triggers. I still can’t understand how grief and anxiety can so violently alter my mind and body. I thought that some of these would reduce over time (in some instances they’ve gotten worse, for goodness sake!) but I'm learning that this, too, is ok.
I look at what is available as resources now and I think we have come a long way from where we were as a society 4 years ago. Maybe it took a worldwide pandemic to do it?
But there are literally Facebook groups, widow stories, online counselling, podcasts, widow conferences that simply didn't exist in 2019 when I was seeking, and desperately needing them.
For the new widows of the world I think it is amazing. As I have said a million times before, widowing is just like being a new mother - there's no handbook, everyone has an opinion on how you should do it, and you're mostly just bumbling along hoping you're not fucking yourself and the kids up.
And like new parents today, there are a million new resources available that simply didn't exist when I started doing it. And for the new parents of today, that is a good thing.
I don't look at what's available to widows now with envy, I can see what use they would have been, but I'm not in that place any more, and I'm glad for the new widows they have it. I know widows who went before me look at the fact I can write stuff into a blog post and share it is so far ahead of the loneliness and isolation they dealt with, because the internet didn't even exist in the 1990s. Let alone the widows who went before them.
The irony of it all, is that bumbling my way through widowing and writing it out online has meant I have found people I would have never met if Pete hadn't died and I hadn't shared my story. I wouldn't have been interviewed on podcasts. I wouldn't have really found out how truly amazing strangers can be. I wouldn't have physically and virtually met widows from around the world. I wouldn't have facelessly 'met' people who I now consider friends.
It's not been all beer and skittles though (mostly it was wine and gin, if I'm honest ...) and the reverse for a lot of that is also true.
The learnings I have had in some aspects in the last 4 years have absolutely not all been positive, and people have not always been amazing (people in their deepest grief, show their truest selves) and I have lost friends along the way.
But also things have changed since that very beginning.
The person I was when I started writing all this down - and the person I was before Pete died - is not the same person who writes this now.
In some ways that is a good thing.
In other ways, I am sad to have been forced to let parts of me and my former life go. I liked that life. A lot. Loved it, even.
But a year of grief, 2 years of a pandemic, a year out the other side and to now has changed me and it has finally begun to show me that I am ok. The kids are ok.
Not fixed. Not over it. Not moving on.
But at a point in our lives where we know we are ok. We are going to be ok.
And I don't know what that means for this blog.
When I started this, I thought it would just be a few posts. I had no idea. But maybe I'd just do it for a month or six months and then I'd be over it and better and moving on and blah blah blah to little old grief-ignorant me!
Someone once suggested I probably wouldn't need to do it after a year, I mean, after the first year, everything is ok or better, right?
Some times I have typed into the void of this blog and desperately grasped onto the capacity to just expel my thoughts and hope I didn't scare a lot of people into thinking I wasn't ok, but also, I was not... but I couldn't say that out loud.
Some times I have typed into this page and thought my commentary on my life doesnt matter so much to anyone except me or I'd written it when I was so bitter and angry and twisted up in rage, that I've saved it as a draft and/or deleted those hundreds of words ... because I'd gotten it out of my head and my heart.
So 4 years, 108 published posts (and as many started and deleted) later, I think I can almost actually see that the path ahead... while still fraught with potholes ... is ok.
And I now know I can drag myself up from a wallowing or a deep dark pit of not ok. Or I can ask for help.
Because as I have come to be shown in the last little while is just how amazing my kids are - how strong and resilient and kind and caring and emotionally aware and fiercely loving and deeply feeling they are.
And the experience of losing their Dad is not something anyone should have to do at the ages they did - and I have seen adults not be able to deal with it - but they have shown themselves be utterly excellent human beings because of and in spite of that.
And raising excellent human being is all Pete and I ever wanted to do as parents.
Does that mean I am never going to have to face up to a school principal with one of them having smoked or drunk alcohol or made some poor life choices? Probably not - they are genetically our children, after all.
But for now, I can actually and finally, after four years of teetering on the edge of 'I have no fucking idea what I am doing and I am sure I am doing it all wrong and I can't let the kids down and I need to do all the things' sit down think: it's ok. The kids are ok, we are ok. I am ok.
And like people keep reminding me - done is better than perfect.
We will never ever be done mourning Pete. He will be with us and part of us forever.
But we are done with the anxiety-ridden, second guessing, guilt-riddled living, because the last 4 years has shown us that we can get.it.done.
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