Finding Our Way with Grief

I realize now, fourteen months after he died, that grief is now a permanent part of my life. I will always love him and he will always be gone. Therefore, I will always grieve. It will not always be the shock of the first days or the depression of the second year or the pain of the moment, but as surely as an amputee will never regrow his leg, I will grieve until we are united again in death.

This is a fact of my new life and so now I am trying to learn how to live in this new life. Im learning to accept it. Grief isn’t going to end, so how do I live my life with grief. How do I walk with one leg.

I’m trying to figure out how to spend our time, how to eat, how to live. The man we both loved is gone. So how shall we now live? Everything feels awkward, except being home. At home we talk about him and look at photos, but it’s comfortable. I cry, but it feels sadly normal for him not to be there. It feels as home as any place without him can feel.

But besides staying home, how do we want to now live? It’s fine to say I should do whatever I want, but what do I want and when is it worth it to push through the initial discomfort. I feel like I’m recovering from an injury and I truly have no idea if I will walk again. I don’t know if my ankle is strained and I can walk it off, or if it’s broken and I’ll damage it more by pushing, or if it’s paralyzed and I will never walk again. Can I feel part of any community besides a community of widows? Can I be a part of a group of “normal folks?” Can you move into a mature adult community when you have a child? I think I’ve begun to idealize retire,met communities because I know I’ll find other widows there.

But despite my exhaustion and grief, I’m an insanely long ways from being at a place where I can move into a mature adult subdivision. So what do I do in the meantime? How do I find my rhythm, my people, my community, my schedule? Will Zoya be excluded from things because her mother doesn’t come as part of a pair?

I’m feeling my way through this season, trying to figure out if it’s time to push through open the door to new things. Or should we still just stay home and heal? Should we stay home or take healing walks and spend time with our closest friends, or are we strong enough to try new things and find out what this new life will look like?