Shelby

Yes. This.

I love you all.

I am so grateful to all of you for sharing your thoughts.

Oh, @anniegirl. My heart broke reading this. Very different and yet so very similar. Thank you so much for sharing your heart and your experience. It's my hope that those who follow behind us will read these posts from all of us and know that it can get better. It does get better.

I get that. I grieve the Rich that I fell in love with and married and I grieve the Rich who would have been if he'd been allowed to grow older in a "normal" way. Kind of like grieving the life we had before and also grieving the life we might have had.

Maureen, that is just beautiful. Thank you for sharing those words with us. My heart holds your heart close and sends big hugs. Shelby

1) Yesterday was the fifth anniversary of Rich's death. It felt like it was going to be a big, scary thing. It wasn't. I didn't live the timeclock of events in my head. It was a "normal" day. 2) I've been approved for services by the Florida Division of Blind Services and hopefully will see my trainer this week. As I lose my sight, I am seeing life so much more clearly! 3) As I work here in "my" room, my new husband is in the other room grousing about his internet connection (he works from home). It is such a normal, every day sound. I love it (not that the internet is temperamental, just the simplicity of such problems!). 4) Can I cheat and do one more? I wasn't really faithful at YWBB the last year or so. I'm grateful to have an opportunity to rekindle old friendships and make new ones here!

I'm Shelby. I'm five years out as of yesterday, March 8, 2015. i took care of my beloved Rich for a very very long time until his death from complications of diabetes and I would do it all over again. I kind of am. My new husband, Joe, also is diabetic and is beginning to have eerily similar complications. A part of me is afraid the writing is on the wall. I lost myself along the way and didn't realize it until I went for grief counseling and the dude asked me what I liked to do for fun. I had no answer. Fun was such a distant memory and the hardship of those years and the aching emptiness of loss had changed me so much. YWBB and the people there helped to save me. The people there, both online and in person, helped me begin to find who this new Shelby would be. So I'm glad that, in its absence, Justin and Jess have made this place available to us oldsters who need to revisit and to help and especially for all the baby widows who will come behind us. Shelby

This phrase for those of us whose spouses had a terminal prognosis gets thrown around a lot. Do you believe in grieving in advance? Did you do some anticipatory grieving and did it hurt you or help you? I did do some anticipatory grieving, mostly because everything that made Rich who he was was gone long before he died. In my case, it helped through the early days, those shocky, I-can't-believe-this-actually-happened days, but it caught up to me at about month 5 and I quickly spiraled downhill. It took a long time to recover from that spiral and it was made harder by all the people who thought I should have been prepared. One-on-one grief counseling and then, much later, GriefShare helped a lot. How about you guys?

There's POWER in sharing your story -- both for yourself and for those who read it. I've gotta run do an errand but I'll be back to share mine a bit later this morning. Short version: 15 years of increasing caregiving to a diabetic husband whose complications had complications. The last several years I was 24/7 caregiving. He died March 8, 2010, so I just hit my 5-year yesterday and I can tell you with certainty that there IS recovery, there IS learning to sleep again, there IS a letting go of needing to control things based on fear of what will happen if you don't. I want to hear your story.

Hi everybody. Pull up a chair and let's talk about what extreme caregiving has meant to us, how it's helped and hurt our grief processes, and anything else that comes up related to our caregiving experiences. You are safe, understood, and loved. Shelby