Hallow's Eve

It is Halloween. 

I have been ruminating lately.  So many things rolling in my head it feels like a rock polisher.  I think I used to write so much because I couldn't think properly.  Couldn't formulate ideas that were trying to form. As my facebook quote says: 

I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it. We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.

The fog is fading slightly and I am able to rest more.  I'm starting to do more things that I couldn't do just a few months ago.  My living room and dinning room is 98% finished painting.  I didn't think I'd ever get that done.  I couldn't paint it without Mary because I felt guilty doing something she and I were going to finish together.  Now I can finish it even though I still feel guilty.  It's just a dull guilt because I am talking to Mary more.  Or rather she is talking to me.  Telling me it's ok or it'll be alright to do this or that.

Tony came to town, spent a week, got the doggies and headed back to Alaska.  He looked healthy.  Still has those sad downcast eyes over the smiling face.  But he is living each day as best he can.  He went to Chilkat Lake in Haines to be with Mary one more time.  Don't know when I'll see him again now that he has the doggies.

I am still walking along that long, long endless beach.  I think I'm walking up and down the coast.  Some days when I'm close to the spot where Mary is I am wrenched back into the pain of the first day.  I cry but mostly at night.  Eventually I fall asleep and walk past it.  The farther away I get the calmer the skies get and the surf quiets.  I can see fragments of my past life that I couldn't before.  They are deformed and broken but they are still part of me and I pick them up.  I am trying to put some of the together like a jigsaw puzzle but it's going to take awhile.  They don't look like they used to.  Some pieces I have to throw into the ocean.  They will never be part of anything again so why torture myself trying to figure them out.  These are like little pieces of shattered glass from a large colored window.  When glass is heated it melts but when it's heated and part of an explosion the little pieces don't fit together quite the same.  And it takes a very long time to put them all back.

I had not seen these little shards until a few months ago.  Maybe right after they called Danny for the heart he didn't get.   I realized a lot of things.  I can't keep having Mary's parties - way too painful.  I can't expect everyone to miss her like I do - they just will never forget her.  They will remember her in their own way. I remembered that I still need to try to not hold on so tight to Julie and Danny.  They need their space as I do.  I still hold on to Kerry.  I remember what it felt like to look forward to something - to be excited.  Too bad he didn't get his heart that day.  He will one day and I will be excited again.  But I learned I can be excited about life.   I learned there are new happenings on the horizon.  One occurred when Danny took me to the hospital and I was the patient.  He understood what I feel when he's the patient.  Mary had been there before but not Danny.

I asked myself "Am I learning to move on?"  No, not really. I'm learning a new way of living.  Everything I once thought about how others coped with the lose of a child or spouse has entirely changed.  No one really understands unless it happens to you.  Which is true about most things.  I think about Granny Davis who lost 2 children and wonder how she made it to 80.  She never told me about them.  My sisters did.  I wonder about so many other people I have known and never understood them.

No, I'm not moving on or getting on with my life.  I am creating a whole new approach to it.  With a little help from my friends....(actually a lot of help).

Will write more later.