twin_mom

My DH has been gone now for 8.5 years. I know I didn't send thank you cards to everybody. I remember trying to work through the list and I think I only got halfway. Every now and then it'll pop in my head that I didn't finish the list and I'll regret not acknowledging the kindness shown to us. Your post has inspired me to pull out the box, find the list that I know I made for myself and at least finish it. Maybe even send others notes of gratitude as well. Thank you.

I believe there's no real "moving on". Yes our lives move forward and we begin to have this whole branch that doesn't involve our loves. But it doesn't mean we moved on. It means we owe it to ourselves and to them to continue living and experiencing and bringing them with us through our memories while we build new ones.

1. Took care of the 17 year old twins that both had wisdom teeth out yesterday. It's like having two infants all over again. God bless all of you who have little kids. I forgot how hard it is mentally! 2. In between being my kids' drug pusher I organized all the pictures from 2004 and 2005. I gathered all the digital pictures from everywhere, put them in one place, organized them by month, uploaded them to our home cloud and then backed them up to a cloud out in the wide world in case my house burns down. I'll at least have pictures of them when they were 1 and 2 years old. 🤣 3. Ummmmm..... haven't really done a third thing today! I didn't even shower! However I do hope to entice said drugged-up twins to eat some ravioli tonight so that'll be my third thing -thinking positive. 😁

1. Took daughter shopping for tees for summer camp- it's good that WV doesn't care that NC is a hotbed of the 'rona right now so she can still go. 2. Helped son get his packed dry bag into a large duffel as he leaves tomorrow for summer camp in FL. Again - good thing that border is still open! 3. Going up to work on some Christmas cards soon!

You can still vent here - I think the point that your original post was just a vent was lost, I interpreted similar to Mike.... Social isolation does suck when you're alone... but I keep telling my kids and myself that this is hopefully the one time in our lives that it's the social expectation to stay home so we should take advantage of it and do something that interests us, explore new hobbies or genre of movies or recipes......

Hi everyone - I'm Mary. My husband died from AML in 2012, 133 days after diagnosis. I was 38, our twins were 9- they just tuned 17 and were so excited for the spring of their junior year but are now stuck home with me. 🤣 I recoupled and got engaged to a great guy 2 years ago, he lives with us.. . but i'm so afraid to get married again because I don't want to be a widow again. I know logically that that's completely crazy and if something happened to him I'd be just as devastated, but emotionally just thinking about it to write that elevates my heart rate.... he's great and says he'll wait for as long as it takes, but i know marriage is important to him. Anyways - I hope you all are hanging in there, this whole situation sucks.

Being okay with death and actively seeking death are two totally different things. Why did he bring up going to heaven - you mentioned homework- mine have said things asking the lines of "if I die right now I'll never have to <fill in blank> again because I'll be having fun in heaven with dad" over the years. My response has usually been something like "but you're not dying right now so go get <fill in blank> done" 😂 While this conversation would probably make many people cringe it is just the fact of our lives. Our children are intimately acquainted with death.

Him starting shaving was such a traumatic day for me!

Congratulations on your baby! I have not had a baby since becoming a widow - but I did have post partum depression after having my twins.... definitely talk to someone (your doctor) about your feelings, they sound very similar, and very normal, to mine!

@DonnaP - wow!! That's so unfortunate. I have the opposite, MIL was trying to marry me off in DH's hospital room - "mom, I'm not dead yet can you at least let my body get cold" 🤣

I got "spoken to" by MIL for not bringing NG with me to celebrate Christmas with her- but he opts to stay home as he's not comfortable going for holidays...

You've come to the right place to release those emotions. We all get it. I've missed so many deadlines to pay for things I have never had asked for so many exceptions in my life!

1. Drove DD all over the place to finish her Christmas shopping. A couple hours into it she turned to me and said "Mom thank you for taking me shopping today I know you had other things to do." While I had lots of other things to do, she's an 11th grader now and is talking about taking a semester at sea for her first semester of of college so who knows when the next time I'll be able to go Christmas shopping with her after next year is. and hopefully she'll have a driver's license for next year so even then I may not be able to take her Christmas shopping. 2. finished up my own Christmas shopping while I was driving DD all over the place. 🤣 3. not actually done yet but hopefully will finish the collar on a sweater for DS that I'm crocheting him for Christmas!

Fuck you SIL.... last year you, yet again, made sure that I knew you didn't consider me and my children (YOUR niece and nephew) part of the family ... but again when MIL needs someone to be with her for a medical procedure you expect me to drop everything and be there (MIL is 95, legally blind, has mobility issues and is sundowning to the point that she keeps asking me why DH doesn't call her anymore but I just took her to the beach for Thanksgiving because SIL hasn't taken her out of the building since putting her in assisted living last year). I made a promise to DH to watch out for MIL, but that doesn't include jumping to your bidding when you make appointments for her that you can't attend, for procedures I don't agree with, when your daughter is geographically closer and is the medical POA!

My kids still hate hearing "I'm sorry for your loss", my daughter especially. She once answered, "He's not lost, he's dead". 🙄 She was 10 at the time. My new answer to death/illness is "that really sucks"- because it does; granted saying that makes me sound young/uneducated, but I think it sums most situations up nicely without using empty platitudes/triggering phrases. I'm glad you found a therapist who has helped you with a path forward.

I'm late to the discussion but just wanted to say it's not silly to cry over an 11 year old couch. It's yet another piece of your lives together that is being replaced by something that he had no part in. It sucks. But it's also part of building the next chapter...so enjoy your new couch, I hope you love it and it lasts another 11 years! (I may have fought NG over getting rid of my loveseat, which actually predated DH, was almost 20 years old, and was in such sad shape that I took it to the dump instead of donating it...)

This 👆 Even though I'm engaged to a great guy, I still feel married to DH in some respects... my love for him has taken a smaller role in my life, but it's still there and I still feel committed to him in some aspects.

@KrypticKat - that sucks that you've been excluded. Maybe it's for a valid reason, similar to why you left her out of the birthday memorial...but it still stings and is disappointing.

1. watched my 2 year old step-grandson (DH's daughter's son) - I'll be watching him most of this month to help my stepdaughter out since she started a new job today but doesn't have childcare until the new year. My kids are 16, so it was fun to have a toddler- but honestly I was working (&traveling) when mine were 2 so I rarely dealt with them all day by myself! (I went back to work when mine were 15 months old) 2. I got the call that DH's storage unit was officially closed out (he's been gone over 7 years and I finally got rid of everything in the unit, which was mostly his dad's stuff- yes, I was paying a small fortune to store the belongings of a man who died before I even met DH....) 3. I may have bought myself a few things for Christmas during the cyber monday sales. 😮

I don't think the purposelessness ever fully goes away. I'm 7 years 1.5 months out and I still have days that I'm empty, when I miss him so much. Even though for all intents and purposes I've rebuilt my life- I'm engaged to a wonderful man, my children are doing fantastic, and I'm lookibg forward to what I'm going to do next professionally (as soon as I can figure out that's going to be). But I don't want those empty days to go away; I feel that they're a sign of how great our love was and how important he was to me and I'm okay with paying the price of that emptiness for the glorious years we had together.

Mine were 9 when he died, but barely remember him.... and there are days when I think he didn't die but split himself into these two wonderful kids we made. He's in my son's expressions, my daughter's attitudes, both their stupid jokes....

I just passed seven years, and you've been a fixture in my life since then. I'm so amazed by you and your ability to continue on and continue to try to find happiness. You have inspired and touched so many of us.

I wish you all the best with this new chapter. You're so right sometimes we need a little distance to remember all the reasons why we love a place and we need to be there.

You are so not alone Laurie!

I won't tell you not to feel guilty, it's what you're feeling and therefore valid. I will tell you my husband had MDS (meleodysplastic syndrome). I told his doctor in late January something was wrong - both the doctor and DH told me no. February comes, his back pain is worse, ortho can't figure out what's wrong, PT isn't helping. By the end of the month he's rarely getting out of bed. By end of March, pain had spread to his hip and knee, he's completely bed ridden, doctor still says MDS wouldn't cause this, but send the MRI the ortho had done as it will give him a look at how his bone marrow is doing. April 16 he sends the CD to the doctor. I come home from work that day, he's in tears - no, he hasn't heard from the doctor, but he spent all day trying and he can't orgasm anymore, "I think something's wrong with me" Are you f****** kidding me?!! The fact that you haven't gotten out of bed in over a month, you've lost over 20 pounds, you're alternating opioids every 3 hours but still can't get the pain under control and you sleep all the time but you didn't think anything was wrong with you but when you can't get off is your hint that something must be wrong? I couldn't even. About an hour later that evening the doctor himself did call, he looked at the MRI, there's what looks like leukemia tumors in his knee and we need to be at the hospital by 7 a.m. the next morning for an unscheduled bone marrow biopsy. by the end of the week we find out he has full-blown leukemia and he's in the hospital to start chemotherapy and 104 days later they send them home to me to die because while they got rid of the leukemia his bone marrow never recovers and he's unable to make blood any longer and he has secondary infections which is preventing him from going to bone marrow transplant and there's nothing left they can do. The day he came home from the hospital in August all I could think was in January I told them something was wrong. If we had discovered the leukemia in January maybe he'd still be here. unlike you I was there listing all the symptoms. For months. It didn't matter. So maybe if you had been there they would have found the sepsis earlier. But maybe they wouldn't. Maybe they would have said he had the flu and done a flu test. we'll never know what might have happened; at the end of the day we're both left to live the rest of our lives without our loves. You didn't pick an essay over him. A horrible situation happened and you've been left to make sense of the senseless and pick up the pieces.