LISA O

orginally written in May 2023

He took my life too…

It took me 453 days to make this realization.  10,872 hours of breathing in and out when that smacked me in the face.  I wrote it in the notes of my phone, I wanted to keep it close as it felt significant.  I didn’t have to record it; I say it in my head at least a dozen times a day.  I’m writing this fourteen days after that significant moment.   These last 14 days have been heavy, I realize that I’m not just mourning the loss of his life, but now have shifted to mourning my own too.

I’ve made changes, but they have all been superficial, dopamine inducing – redecorated spaces in my home to make it feel different, sold off all the big-ticket items I had no use for, fixed some things in the house that always bothered me that he always said, ‘were fine’.  I even got another dog.  I fucking climbed Kilimanjaro in those 453 days and took 4 other trips trying to ‘keep living’.  I kept doing things because I thought it was progress.

What changed?  What triggered me to have that thought?

I was ready to date 8 months after Rob took his life.  I didn’t do anything about it, I decided to wait until after the anniversary of his death.   I turned on dating apps just before I left for the UK trip I had planned. I had no idea what I was getting into.   I didn’t know how to flirt, to have small talk online to ‘get to know’ someone, dating virtually didn’t exist in 1994 the last time I dated. I got nowhere fast, and it stirred all kinds of self-esteem issues within me.  I felt shallow and empty.  Yet I kept browsing.  When I returned from the UK, I turned around and left for Mexico for 5 days (the travel for dopamine was starting to get old at this point).

Mid-March all trips were done, nothing new planned.  It was time to hunker down and figure out how to live alone, refocus on work and the new version of myself I had found on Kilimanjaro.

What changed?  What triggered me to realize my life was taken from me too?  I still haven’t answered, I will, just not yet.

I did just that, I hunkered down and worked on the steak sauce company that I had been ignoring while travelling.  I was settling in, still browsing on dating apps but not really engaging with anyone.  The feelings of inadequacy were still stirring, and I was super lonely.  People around me, lots of friends checking in on me but the lonely was still there.  Easter weekend came around and I had my sister-in-law and my 4-year nephew visiting, having a busier than normal weekend was great, but I was still lonely.

That same weekend a conversation was started with me online, it was light-hearted and fun, and it wasn’t on a dating app.  It was with someone familiar to me.  At first, I wasn’t sure what was happening or how to handle and it was just a fun conversation.  I screenshot part of the conversation and sent to a friend who promptly said, ‘he’s flirting with you, flirt back’. Well, I did, likely in the most awkward way.   I felt less lonely.

No one really tells you that in the second year of grief after losing a spouse you spiral again.  I wonder often if this is just me, or like I said earlier I am now mourning my life lost.  Suicide plays a factor here too.  My pragmatic self knows that Rob didn’t abandon me, knows that I wasn’t the reason he took his life.  I do feel abandon, I do feel like I wasn’t worth living for, those feelings are valid when your partner commits suicide.

In the second year there is less leaning on people and more leaning into yourself.  Figuring out who I am without Rob is something I didn’t expect to be so hard.  I always thought I maintained a great sense of self throughout our relationship.  It isn’t the sense of self that I lost when he died, what I lost in me is how my life functions.  Mundane everyday activities, some even you resented just gone.  Making a pot coffee, enough for two, deciding what to have for dinner and taking into consideration another person’s needs, having someone to beat at Jeopardy each night, someone else to get up and let the dogs out, the list goes on.   Who I am at home, who I am in our old couple social circles, who I am and not who we are – it’s so fucking hard to grasp.

What changed?  Again, I go back to what triggered ‘he took my life too’.  The answer is affection, intimacy.  Affection and intimacy with another man.  A man I was familiar enough with that it wasn’t scary, unfamiliar enough with that I still felt somewhat awkward.  I felt less lonely.   

When affection and intimacy came back into my life it made me realize how much of my old life was also over.  It triggered feelings that needed to be released.  I didn’t realize how starved for affection I had been before and after his death.  Long before he died the affections were gone, we were intimate and truly loved each other – but small affections and such were absent.  I thought it was me, that those gestures, those little touches didn’t mean anything and didn’t matter.  That was a compromise I made that I didn’t even know I had made.

Depression took my life too…