MissingBilly

Today is my six-month mark, so I guess I will officially announce myself. Been a mess all week. The "shock wears off, reality sets in tag line" is so true. Even though he had Stage 4 cancer, I was deeply in shock for the first weeks/months. I have felt like curtains get opened every month or so that allow a little more of the deep grief to be unveiled, and I think this week maybe three or four curtains got pulled back at once. No kids, just me and the cats. Mom died a few years ago. Friends have gone back to their lives. Every day I feel like I have my nose pressed up against a plate glass window, looking at everyone else living the life I don't have anymore.

My birthday was a few weeks ago, just before the five-month mark. I spent the day surprisingly enraged at most of my friends (real life and Facebook types) who all gave me the big "Happy Birthday Have a Great Day!" type of wishes that succeeded in making me feel so alienated and terrible--how could anyone say that to me? How could they think I would be anything other than miserable? Also, the highlighted that, as a widow with no kids for whom DH was about 90% of my social life, I am just so alone. It also makes me fear the holidays--and his birthday right before Christmas--terribly.

Friday nights have been terrible for me--DH worked the evening shift Sun-Thur, so we only had from when I got off of work on Friday until he went to work Sunday afternoon as our true "us" time. In recent weeks Friday night has been me sniffling along to TLC's Long Lost Family. Oddly cathartic, and maybe somewhere deep down my subconscious is dreaming of a reunion of my own some day....

Yesterday was the On This Day where DH announced to the world he had cancer. I knew it was coming, but wasn't sure exactly when until I fired up FB yesterday morning and was greeted with it. It was so dignified, and so honest. I was so proud of him. As Julester says, it's a total love/hate relationship. We were both extremely active on FB, and tagged each other in our posts a lot, so there's a lot of wonderful memories, and some tough ones.

My DH very much believed this, and I do too--life is a deck of cards, and he just had a stupid card (cancer) come out of the deck. There is no why, as you said. Doesn't mean it can't be devastating to those left behind, and that we can't be full of whys and wishes that it hadn't, but none of us really have any control over how our lives play out in the big picture. As you said, there is a level of peace in that approach, and certainly it has given me some peace in knowing that that was how he felt about it. (He also was completely content with the life he had lived, even in its shortened state. He did so much with his shortened time.) On my stronger days, I use this to remind myself of the underlying truth when I look at my future and imagine decades without him. He died at 55--I am 50. What if I only have five years left? Random is random.

I'm at 11 weeks, so almost three months, and am feeling so many of the same things. I am 50--we were just getting ready to cut back from full-time work and start to see what new lives we could create (no kids), and now I am alone, worried I could live many years still without him (and kinda hoping that fate intervenes and I don't), with absolutely no idea who I am after 24 years together. We were so intertwined--everything in our lives, every decision, every move, was a team effort. And now I am so guilt-ridden to be here alone, moving on while he can't, and so overwhelmed that I have to come up with a completely new "me', because there is almost nothing left that wasn't one-half of "us," and half-of-an-"us" is not especially well-suited to being middle-aged and alone. Our hobbies were shared, our interests were the same, we spent so much of our free time together, that I just have almost nothing that's only mine. And, as Trying said, right now I have absolutely no energy to try to figure any of it out. I watched TV for 12 consecutive hours yesterday. It was all I could do. I guess we just have to trust what those further down the road say, that the mind does begin to process things differently as time passes. So I am trying to tamp down my intense internal expectations to Do Something, and just try to sit with it all for now. But it's so painful.

Ditto, ditto, ditto on the deafening silence, the constant stream of messaging with each other all day every day, and now the group chat with girlfriends. We worked different schedules, and so the chatting was also the way we interacted during the work week. I miss it so much. (I still open up the window and send him things from time to time.)

I did not lose my DH to an accident, but one thing I keep telling myself is: if he hadn't been diagnosed with cancer, if he had kept on with "normal" life, who is to say that he wouldn't have gotten hit by a car a week later? Or that something else awful wouldn't have happened? No, of course the odds aren't likely, but all of you who lost your spouses in accidents I'm sure feel like the odds weren't that your love was going to die in such a random way. It's hard, especially when we look around at friends or friends of the family who have had long happy marriages, to believe that if this one thing hadn't gone so terribly wrong, that we would have gotten the same Happily Ever After that we see around us. And, of course, if you are young and your friends are young, you don't know what lies in their near-term future, either. It doesn't change the What Ifs, of course, but maybe there's a nugget in there that might help.

Not silly at all. My FB avatar has been Anger off and on in recent months. I also think the lesson of Inside Out is very helpful to people in our situation--that sometimes you have to be sad to get through something, and that it's okay. And that not everything you love in life gets to come along for the entire journey.

Hi, I posted a reply elsewhere, but decided to officially introduce myself. I've actually been lurking for a number of months, because when DH was diagnosed with cancer last year, it was very very unlikely that he'd beat it. He was sick for about nine months. He was 55, I'm 50, and never had kids, by choice, and were each best friends, by a mile. He worked evenings, so we didn't really see each other except on weekends, but we messaged each other constantly. Worked at the same place for many years. Didn't really see that many friends socially, because when we had time available, we really just wanted to be with each other. Definitely textbook introverts. So, needless to say, I am terrified about how I am going to do without him. I am functioning pretty well three weeks in--things that need to get done are getting done, and I am very lucky that we had done all of our estate planning and gotten all of our ducks in a row and so there is very little I have to worry about right now. Other than the prospect of living without the man who meant everything to me. I'm also without my mother since a few years ago, so I've gone from a life where I had everything exactly the way I would have wanted it to what feels like a smoking blast crater. I'm also one who tends to withdraw, so the friends buzzing about are making me anxious. I'm trying to not think ahead, and just pay attention to what's in front of me, but that's generally not how this brain works. But I truly have no clue what my future will bring--we were getting ready to cut back on working, so my job doesn't really hold much interest (x2 given that we both worked there). Our hobbies were so intertwined, so it's hard to think about what I might throw myself into. I believe I will be okay eventually, but for now I'm just bewildered and numb and guilty and so sad that we didn't get more time, while also so very thankful for the time we had together. That we managed to find each other was an amazing stroke of luck--we were just so perfect for each other, everyone has always said so. That is my rambling hello. Thanks for being here.

You're going to have to sob. Best to get it over with. Your emotions are screaming at your brain to recognize the horror. You can clamp down on them, but they never give up. They'll find a way out, and usually in a bad way. Best to find some alone time, look through the picture albums and scrapbooks, and name the horror, then let it out. Thanks. As it turns out, it happened about six hours after I posted. Without my trying to force it. It was pretty intense. About 45 minutes of hyperventilating.

Hi, I am female but with you in numbness, though I am much earlier in the process. My DH died less than a month ago, after a nine-month illness. I cried pretty much every day while he was sick (we knew it was unlikely he'd beat it), and then about 20 minutes after he died, it stopped. I've had moments or two of what I'd call "surface crying" -- tears falling, but not the wracking sobs that I know are in there somewhere. I know at some point the dam will break, but I think right now the shock is still so overwhelming that my brain and body are just exerting maximum control for now. We were absolute soulmates, together more than 20 years, and had no kids (by choice), so it is a staggering loss for me, and I think the level of shock and numbness is in line with that. (I also have deep internal shivering, especially when interacting with people. Has anyone else ever had that?)