Two Years Ago....

Two years ago, less than three months after he died, I went looking for him.
I remembered this today, as I made a to-do list. Things that need to happen before two of my three kids fly back east, without me.

Even now, the notion of looking for him makes sense.

So, I went back to the post I wrote on August 4, 2009.

-----

The chair where he always sat by the water in Maine.

This place is saturated with him.

I awake from a bad dream and prefer to go back to it rather than acknowledge that the other half of the bed is empty.

It feels like it did in the beginning, raw and suffocating. I am steeped in disbelief. I am not here without him, I think. He’s in the kitchen.

And when he’s not there, I think he’s stretching in the living room.

And when I check and see the floor empty I think, he’s down by the water.

I walk down expecting to find his long legs stretched out, his head back, eyes closed, hands intertwined and resting on his flat belly, dressed in his red fleece to protect from the dewy morning.

And when I don’t see him there,
I sink into his chair
and sob.

This is that wave that my friend spoke about. The grief wave. It comes, up over my head and with magnificent force shoves me down to the bottom, smashing me. It lifts and tosses me until I don’t know which way is up. I am afraid to breath.

So I don't breath, I cry until I magically float to the top, where this time, there is not another wave waiting for me.

---
12:10, three hours after
I
went
looking for him.

Looking for him?
Searching for him. Like he might just be in this one other place, this one place I forgot to look. Against logic. I saw his dead body. Against common sense, why would he be here?

But I just had to check, to see, to make sure that he really wasn't there or here or maybe at the store. The chair by the water was the last place I knew he would be if he were still alive.

Now I sit on the porch of Blue Hill Books, unwrap my new journal and begin writing. My lungs fill with air that is filled with him.

I'm still breathing.
--

I remember that day. I remember the sadness and the surprise of my action. What I find so amazing now is that, just like my friend said it would, the pain is not sharp or forceful or even scary. There is a sense of loss, dull, like someone gently putting pressure on my back. Noticeable, but not distracting or overwhelming. I am surprised to find myself here.

In this place of acceptance and dare I say...okness?

I am relieved to find myself here.
Finally, a place where it doesn't hurt as much.
Finally....

Mattering

my daughter Pallas (2nd from the left) and her friends

She says to me “Kim, you’re important. Other widows want to meet you. They ask if you will be there.”

I was talking to Michele, the founder of this blog, Camp Widow, Widow’s Village and Soaring Spirits Foundation.

She was trying to convince me to come to widow camp.

I wasn’t going. Even though I live just two hours away.
I wasn’t going.

I’m important, I whispered to myself. I’m important.
I matter to other people.
I had not felt that way since…
Art died.

The moment Art died I felt like I mattered less.
Like the space I took up in this world was not nearly as important as the space others take up.

I was not a wife anymore.
As a wife I knew I mattered to one other adult. I mattered a lot to him.

As a widow there is no one to call to say “I’m on my way home.”
There is no one to worry about me, or worry with about the kids.
My day doesn’t matter to other people.
They guy who cut me off matters less.
The great deal I got on a dress doesn’t really matter either.
My life and all it’s little insignificant happenings does not matter to anyone else.
It would take days for anyone to realize that the kids and I were gone…or dead.
Without a husband I questioned my matterness.

And it was not until Michele spoke the opposite of what I believed that I saw how I carried around that little belief. I carried it around as sure as I carry around my kids were born from me, that Obama is our president and that I will wake up tomorrow and it will be Sunday.

I don’t matter as much now that I don’t have some to matter to.

That belief just sits there,
quietly,
solidly.
I matter less with no one else to share my life with.

And the thing is I didn’t realize that was my belief until I spoke with Michele.

“I matter,” I whisper again, this time just a little bit louder.
The funny thing is:
if I take a really close look at my life.
if I am honest about who I have become since Art gave me the gift of his death
if I really look at it, I matter more
now
than I did when he was alive.

And if this is true for me, then it is true for many of us widow’s too.

We matter.
We matter to each other.
Every blog that is discovered at 3:23 am, when a widow is terrified of what has happened to her or him,
matters.

The comments that widows leave, the open, honest, "me too" comments that are left and read by THOUSANDS
matter.

The visitors, lurkers, outsiders
matter.

We all matter! It just doesn’t look the same way it did before our partners died.
Heck it doesn’t look the way we were taught it was supposed to look, dead partner or not.

I matter
You matter.

So when you see me at Camp Widow, or out and about in LA, come up and give me a hug.

I need it. I need to be reminded that I matter.
And my guess is you need to be reminded that
you
matter
too.

I think we all do.