Month: June 2022

Last night I cried myself to sleep. The tears came in a steady stream right out of my eyes, across the bridge of my nose, and onto my pillow. They just kept coming-I couldn’t make them stop. They stopped when I finally fell asleep, I think. In a few hours it would be Father’s Day, and you’re not here for us to give you our silly cards and tell you how much we love and appreciate you. You’re not here because…..you’re over there, and you’re never coming back to over here.

Mother’s Day was hard enough without you here but today is even harder. I’ve looked at so many pictures of you the last few days because I wanted to be taken back to the moments in time they were taken. I wish I could step into those pictures and relive those moments. I wish I could experience being in your presence again. I wish I could touch your face again. I wish I could run my hands across your beard and see how it was perfectly made up of a mixture of copper and white. I wish I could run my fingers through your thick, curly red hair again that all the women who cut it said how beautiful it was, because it really was. I wish I could kiss your full lips again that I was always so jealous of because mine are so thin.

No matter how hard I thought any of the times in those pictures were, they are nothing compared to the hard that is now. No one ever told me when I was young and full of hope and dreams of the future that it might be like this. Why didn’t they? Plenty of people I knew back then had experienced the same painful loss as me, yet they never said a thing. Was it something you weren’t supposed to talk about? Was their pain supposed to be shut away in a dark closet where no one else but them saw and felt it? Why did they suffer in silence? Why didn’t they warn the younger ones that life will sometimes be cruel and rip everything away from you in the blink of an eye? I wish I knew the answers to these questions but I don’t.

Father’s Day with you over there hurts. I won’t lie and say it doesn’t. It doesn’t just hurt for me, it also hurts for our children. It hurts for our grandson, too, even if he’s too young to really understand what this day is about and why you acknowledge it. He just knows his Papa isn’t here anymore and he feels your loss very deeply, every day. It’s criminal that he was robbed of having you here to see him grow into adulthood. You should be here to teach him to skateboard, to surf, and to build things with wood and tools. But, you’re not, because you’re over there.

I shared a picture of you with our children on social media late last night. I wrote that today would be hard, and it is. I said that I wish I could grab ahold of you and pull you back over here from the other side. I wrote that love is eternal and transcends time and space, but that it sure doesn’t make it hurt any less. Today, I hope you feel all the love each one of us has for you and know that we are thankful and grateful for the short time we did have with you here, on this side. I hope you carry all that love inside you every second of every day and will send all your love right back down to us from your home up in the clouds in Heaven.

When I got home from the hospital the day that Kenny died I saw that my son-in-law and his mother had washed all the dirty laundry. They washed the clothes in my hamper and stripped the bed where Kenny had the heart attack and cardiac arrest and then made it back up for me. They didn’t want me to have to worry about doing that when I got home and I appreciated that. The very last thing I wanted to have to do after having to unplug my husband’s life support and let him go was to wash the sheets and remake the bed–the same sheets that the paramedics had walked on top of to get to Kenny in the bed and defibrillate him.

I put the clean clothes away, including Kenny’s T-shirts, boxers, shorts and socks. I put his clothes right back where they belonged, because I had to. I could not throw them in a Goodwill bag. His clothes stayed in his dresser for months until I could bring myself to start giving them away. Some of his clothes are still in the dresser as I’m still not ready to give all of them away just yet.

As I was putting that laundry away that evening I saw that there were three of Kenny’s T-shirts that had not gotten washed. This was an odd sense of relief for me. They were the last three T-shirts Kenny ever wore–an old Wave Riding Vehicles shirt with holes in it, one that said Aloha, Hawaii on it, and a yellow Margaritaville shirt. That yellow shirt was the very last shirt Kenny ever wore. We had gone to dinner at Outback Steakhouse the night before he had the heart attack and this was the shirt he wore. The memory of him sitting across the table from me at dinner, wearing that yellow T-shirt and his baseball hat and us talking about nothing important is seared into my memory as this night was the last time he ever spoke to me.

When I saw the three unwashed T-shirts I grabbed them up in my arms and buried my face in them, smelling Kenny’s scent on them. I immediately started to cry. I stood there in our bedroom for a while crying, breathing in the last remnants of Kenny in long, deep breaths. That night, I got into bed clutching those three T-shirts as fiercely as I could. I didn’t really sleep much; there really wasn’t any way I could after just having had the man I’d loved with every fiber in my being for the last 35 and 1/2 years ripped away from me in the most horrific way.

I slept with those T-shirts in the bed nearly every night for the last 8 months. Some nights I cried hard tears for hours all over those shirts and they were still damp the next morning. I wiped my runny nose all over them and my make-up got smeared on them, too. Some nights I hugged those shirts tightly, as if Kenny were still inside them. Some nights they laid on Kenny’s spot on the other side of the bed, untouched, but still there beside me.

In a way, I was using those three shirts as a substitute for him. It’s as stupid as it sounds, I know, thinking three T-shirts could ever take the place of a living human being. I used those three shirts as a crutch to help me make my way through my grieving process, which I’m still very much going through now. Sleeping with those three dirty shirts helped me to feel closer to Kenny and so that’s why I did it. This is one of those times where I say that I did what I had to do and I don’t care what anyone else thinks of what I did.

I have never washed those three shirts. I could never bring myself to do so. I think subconsciously I was afraid that if I did wash them Kenny’s essence would finally be gone and I didn’t want that, not yet. I’m not really sure if I ever will get to the point of washing them. If I don’t then that’s okay, and again, I don’t care what anyone else thinks about that.

Last weekend I went to a past life regression mediation at the Edgar Cayce Center. Past life regression is something I’ve been doing for almost six years. I’ve learned a lot about myself in every one of them and see repeating patterns in a lot of them. I’ve lost my husband at an early age in quite a few of my past lives, just like I have in this one. I’ve also seen members of my family and friends in these regressions. People travel through their lives in soul groups and tend to reincarnate into lives together. Kenny has been my husband in numerous past lives and we were very much soul mates to each other, just like we were in this life.

In the regression I did last Saturday I saw myself as a peasant woman in the middle ages who had lost her husband early. I saw him clutch his chest and fall to the ground as he died in front of her. Her husband was a blacksmith; a craftsman, just like Kenny was. He made all his iron creations in a covered area next to their cottage in the woods. He wore a leather apron he made himself while he was working.

The woman was so distraught over her husband dying, just like me. She went to bed every night with her husband’s dirty leather apron clutched to her chest. She cried many tears of grief into that apron because she missed him so much. I literally could feel her pain right in the middle of my heart and it hurt very badly. I was feeling her pain as my own because I’m her and she’s me and we have both suffered the very same loss of the very same person. My heart was broken witnessing this woman’s pain through my closed eyes.

I wanted to reach back across time and say to this woman “Please tell me it won’t always hurt this bad. Please tell me the pain lessens over time.” But, I can’t do that. Her time here is long gone and her story has long since ended. She can only show me what happened to her; not what is going to happen to me.

As I came out of the regression I had tears in my eyes. Those tears were for this woman and the gut wrenching pain she felt over the loss of her husband, whom she loved with all her heart. Those tears were also for me, for the loss of Kenny, who I also loved with all my heart. Those tears were for all four of us, who are really just the two of us, only in different lifetimes. I cried because we lost someone we loved so deeply. I cried because that loss was suffered much sooner than it ever should have been for both of the me’s and both of the him’s.

It took a few seconds for me to digest the images I saw in this past life regression. After I got over the initial shock of seeing my husband die at such a young age yet again, I realized that this particular past life had something to teach me-that I had repeated the pattern of using my dead husband’s article of clothing as a crutch and it was making it harder for me to finally let him go. It was a sobering realization, and one I wasn’t quite ready to accept, but I knew I needed to so I wouldn’t be stuck on a plateau in my grieving process.

I told my friend I was there with what I’d seen in my regression and that I knew it was time to stop sleeping with Kenny’s shirts in the bed with me. He isn’t here any longer and the other side of the bed doesn’t need to be occupied by his dirty T-shirts. I don’t want to be alone the rest of my life but keeping those shirts in the bed as a crutch will certainly bring that into fruition. You have to make room in your life for what you eventually want to be in it.

That night, I slept with the T-shirts in the bed one more time…..just once more. I hugged them tight like they were Kenny himself. I said to him in my head that it was time to let him go. The next night I put the shirts on the cedar chest at the end of my bed. I haven’t slept with them any more. Those shirts might stay on the cedar chest for a bit until I decide where to put them. I won’t get rid of them-that I’m unwilling to do. Maybe they’ll be made into a T-shirt blanket with some of his other favorite T-shirts. I’m sure our grandson would love to cuddle up with a blanket made from the shirts that belonged to the Papa he loved so much.

I guess this is the acceptance part of grief; that part where you finally and fully accept that your loved one isn’t ever coming back. I’m wiping tears from my eyes as I type these words because there’s such a finality to it. I want to bury my face into those shirts and wipe my tears away with them, but I won’t. It still feels very much unfair that he left all of us, and so young. The pain we all feel still hurts like absolute hell and perhaps it always will. The hole left in our hearts from his death will never be filled because that space was just for him, and him only. But I think I’ve come to a place of making peace with his absence, if peace is what you call it. I just know that I’ve reached a point where I don’t need to sleep with the three dirty T-shirts in the bed next to me every night and that in itself has to be acknowledged in this whole unwanted process of grief.

Looking back over the last eight months since Kenny died, I realized that I had some sort of fog in my brain that I hadn’t realized was there until I started to come out of it a few weeks ago. I had an energy clearing last month by another energy healer and I think that was the catalyst for this fog starting to clear away. I happened across something on the Internet last month called widow brain. As I read about what it was and how it affects you I realized that this is exactly what I had been going through. It was a bright light shone onto something that was making me think I was losing my mind.

As so often happens when you’ve gone through some type of traumatic experience, your brain turns on a switch to help you cope. The switch that comes on after your spouse dies is called widow brain. It comes with a laundry list of “symptoms”, some of which nearly convinced me I was teetering on the edge of madness and that I was completely stupid and worthless.

I could not think straight. I felt like I was walking through a thick haze every minute of every day. I would hear someone say something to me and what I heard either didn’t register with me or only stayed in my head for a very short time. I literally could not process some of the information being told to me or that I was reading. At times, I could not form the simplest of thoughts in my head. This made it hard to learn things and some people thought I was just stupid or inept (or both) for not being able to.

I was very forgetful of a lot of things. I didn’t remember people telling me something, even when they swore they did tell me. It wasn’t that I wasn’t listening to them when they told me-I just did not remember them saying it to me. I often jumbled up in my head some of the things people did say to me. I couldn’t repeat back to them what they just said to me and have it come out of my mouth the same way it came out of theirs.

I forgot how to do some things. I would sit there and look at something I knew how to do before and would think to myself How do I do this? I just could not figure it out. I would be staring at the task at hand with a blank look on my face, silently trying to understand what to do and wondering why I could not remember how to do it. I felt confused a lot of the time. The feelings of frustration made me angry at myself and my feelings of worthlessness were compounded.

I burst out into tears at the most random times. I may have suddenly remembered something about my husband that I had forgotten. I may have come across something of his and started to cry as I held it in my hands. My feelings of extreme sadness and despair were crippling to me and there were some people who were cruel in their inability and refusal to understand this. To those people I will say this-when you lose your loved one I will show you the grace and understanding you did not show to me at a time in my life when I needed it the most.

I was exhausted, both physically and mentally. I could do not much of anything on any given day. I needed to sleep much more than normal. This was my body’s way of healing itself in the ways it needed to be healed. Aches and pains in my body that weren’t there before were there now. This was the extreme feelings of grief manifesting itself as physical pain.

Widow brain affects a good amount of people who’ve lost their spouse. There is no written in stone timeline of how long it will last. It’s different for everyone, just like how long it takes for you to go through your grieving process. I do believe the energy clearing I had facilitated the beginning of the fog and haze lifting from the widow brain. I can’t say I’ll be sorry to see it leave because I will not. This whole process of grieving and dealing with widow brain has been excruciating to go through and I’ll be thankful to be on the other side of it. Since that fog has started to lift, I can finally see a little bit of light at the end of that dark tunnel I’ve been stuck in for the last 249 days.