Rebecca

5 years together, 2.5 years after

Don’t be concerned about how other people feel. If other people are uncomfortable with your grief, if people are judging you for your grief, because they have no idea what it’s like, even if they’ve lost a parent or if they’ve lost a sibling or a child, these are all horrible things. Absolutely. I couldn’t imagine losing a child, but they do not compare to losing a spouse. The American Psychological Association lists loss of a spouse as the number one, most stressful thing a person can go through because when you lose a spouse, you lose income, support system, identity, all these different things.

Be honest with people. I just decided I tell people; I don’t try to hide it. People ask, ‘How are you?’ I don’t say, ‘Oh, I’m okay’ to make them feel comfortable. No, if I’m having a bad day, I’ll be like, ‘today sucks.’ Most people say, ‘How have you been?’ I’ll say, ‘I have good days, bad days, and everything in between.’ Because it’s the truth. Also, people are going to say inappropriate things to you and you’re going to want to strangle them. I find just silently blinking at them until they’re uncomfortable and walk away is a really good way to do it.

You don’t get over it. You don’t move on from it. You move forward. You know, a lot of people will think like, oh aren’t you over this yet? No. I’m young, my person died, and now I have another 50, 60 years without that person. I said till death, do us part, but I thought we were going to grow old together and now that’s not going to happen. And that just reminded me of a trigger. Sometimes old people holding hands in the supermarket destroys me because I’m never going to have that with him. Might I have it with somebody else? Yes. But I’m never going to have it with him. And it sucks. Yeah. And as an English teacher, I’ve been trying to find a better word for that for two and a half years. And there isn’t one, it just sucks. And we just kind of learn how to live and exist with the suck.