Thanks all. I am currently on some medicine and have been for close to 15 years off and on. Not the same one, mind you.
I am chronically bad at giving myself credit for anything and worse at giving myself a break.
I do continue to appreciate all the kind thoughts and words.
I’d be more worried about you Tyjenks if you weren’t cracking up some. It’s a good sign your going through this now and not bottling it up.
In the long run you might consider some life changes - a new home, or new job, or new town or something like that. Balancing your kids needs of course.
I haven’t really found a philosophy I like entirely. The Hellenistic stuff has good points but is too self centered. Christianity has issues as does Buddhism et al. I’m not sure which belief system is be the best person you can, but I follow that. And that means taking care not just of the world but of yourself as well. Take care bud. You deserve it too.
Definitely need to make changes around the house. My employer has been very good to me throughout and I have a lot of freedom. Plus, I am terrible at change. :)
What has helped in the past has been some variation of Zen Buddhism as made popular by Alan Watts in the 50’s and 60’s before he drank himself to death. It has helped me accept the lack of answers that Christianity begs you to accept with very confusing and paradoxical messages. I have been a mostly practicing Christian my whole life, but I think that was more a product of my upbringing in the Southeast U.S. and my Dad being a Presbyterian minister. It really does not work for me any longer. The biggest problem being as soon as I get to an understanding of anything, there are 20 people who daily explicitly or implicitly try to pull me in a different direction with their overbearing and always assuming Christian beliefs.
You might want to look into Unitarian Universalism. It truly is all about being the best person you can be in additional to being a positive force for change in the world. Atheists are welcome!
I know a lot of us are fans so I figured I’d put this item from Julia Louis Dreyfus twitter feed here.
I saw that yesterday. My wife loved VEEP. She is crazy talented and hilarious.
Patton Oswalt has a fantastic new comedy special on Netflix called Annihilation. I bring it up here because a good portion of it deals with his wife’s death last year and how he and his daughter have been handling it. Funny & touching and possibly therapeutic.
Figured with the New Year I’d give one update about living through the aftermath. It has been close to 5 months since she died.
The kids are doing spectacularly well. My wife passed 3 days before the school year was to start and they skipped the first three days. They have both been involved in their school’s theater programs and both will start lacrosse soon. Their grades have been all A’s and B’s. The routine has been good for them and the holidays were not too bad. We traveled to Seattle to see my wife’s family for Thanksgiving and then did all the things with her family locally for Christmas. There was really only one period of that was rough, but they quickly got through it. Last year through the holidays she was very sick and could do little. So we sort of had a trial run. This year we at least weren’t in a constant state of worry.
I am not doing all that well. My going to my local friendly bar has increased as has my drinking. As a result, so has my tolerance. It’s comfortable, everyone loves me there and I get many free drinks since I am a regular. It’s nice to have that, but it is a double edged sword. It is certainly moderately interfering with my work and home life. My desire and motivation to do anything around the house is nil as evidenced by bags of my wife’s stuff still sitting in the bedroom and the general build up of detritus throughout the house. I am going to hire someone, but I need to get some stuff out of the way first. I simply don’t do it. I know cutting back on the drinking, exercising again and getting the house clean would go a long way to moving forward. I don’t have the will to do it.
The kids are helpful when I ask, but they need to be reminded and instructed. It is difficult now being the good cop and bad cop all the time. I don’t want to do much so how can I crack the whip on them?
There’s more, but it boils down to being lonely, but wanting to be left alone. I still have plenty of people that want to help and do help. I feel like the last couple years I did all I could to get us through and my reward is feeling about as shitty as I did when she was dying. I’ve traded the dread and worry for an emptiness and loss of purpose.
I have been on a few dates (maybe 6 dates with 4 different women) a couple of which were introduced to me by friends of Rebecca. It is weird, but not too much so. They have mostly gone well, but I simply don’t care about any of them and don’t care to do the work. I know this may be “too soon”, but the dates give me something relatively normal to do and a reason to groom myself and someone to talk to who does not know the entire miserable last 3 years of my history. They know the highlights and that’s been good. I don’t feel any guilt for this. i know Rebecca wanted me to move on as do her friends. i don’t want to find her again, but it is all very different as a 48 year old with kids. I do want to be close to someone again. I feel I lost and grieved for that loss of closeness and intimacy long ago.
This is all how it is supposed to be. I do not sit in a corner sobbing because she is gone. I do think the kids and I did a lot of that grieving as she declined as a result of being realistic and preparing. My one lesson I am shouting to all who will listen is to talk about death. No one wants to, but especially if you know someone who is dying and you have family, friends, children that are close to them. It sucks, but pretending like things will be OK and avoiding the conversation makes acceptance much worse.
Faith and hope are good things when used in the proper doses at the proper time, but they can allow you to cling to results that simply are not going to happen. Evidently the annoying minister, when gathered with the few people in the church that organized our support, would not talk about what my family and me would need after Rebecca died. He simply wouldn’t hear it. That boggles my mind. He and I had discussions about how God does not fix things, so I don’t know if he was lying to me about being on the same page or what.
I did group grief counseling for about 8-10 weeks that was moderately helpful. I am still seeing a therapist. I have plenty of people to talk to. None of it is very helpful. I guess maybe I would be a basket case if I did not ramble to anyone who will listen, but I feel like I am another person, one I do not like and I can find no way forward. Again, most likely par for the course, but I’m tired of it all.
Ty, life changes can be good and bad. I drink, too. It’s a crutch, but remember to balance social activities around being social, not just socially drinking. It’s getting you out of the house and used to others as part of your social network though, so don’t overlook that. You can easily transfer another activity there. Join a league of something, get with a group that does things (meetup is good for this.)
As to the clutter, the best advice I have ever gotten for procrastination and clutter was this: Start not by tackling it all, but just by 1-3 things. Each day you have available, do 1-3 things.
“Today I’ll go through that bag/drawer/closet/room.” Progress slowly.
Setting yourself up with continued push-backs to do a complete spring cleaning will only delay it ever happening. Donate things to places that pick-up if possible. If not, get a friend with a truck or rent one to haul away things in larger steps.
My thoughts are with you, man. Keep moving forward. In times of lackluster and wandering through life, making a new friend is what pulled me out of my funk. It might be too soon for that friend to be a girlfriend, but it isn’t too soon to make new social contacts. It’s hard. It requires effort. It’s worth it.
I think this is a pretty key phrase here – it can be frustrating when you’re kicking hard and you don’t see any forward progress, but you’re smart enough to realize that keeping your head above water is still quite an accomplishment. I’d also note that your hard work is probably a major part of why your kids are not sinking right now.
Mental inertia is a bitch. Skipper’s advice is right on: don’t set a goal of cleaning the house, set a goal of cleaning a counter-top. Or a drawer.
For me, I do checklist/calendars. You put a few items on the calendar for each day and check them off one by one. With this method you can actually schedule in “reward” days where you don’t have anything planned and thus you give yourself “permission” to relax guilt-free.
This works really well, often I will do tasks I would rather not do by segmenting them into chunks. I need to clean the closet, but I don’t want to. But each day I will set like, I will organize the shelves, and listen to a podcast. Then the next day, the hanging clothes, etc.
Works better that way, and you know you only have like a half hour commitment, and as you slowly burn through it all, things start looking cleaner, and you actually want to finish the job.
Thank you for the update Tyler. I had thought of you on occasion over the holidays and I’m glad the children are hanging in there.
Regarding clutter: coincidentally, today my wife had me put about ten huge bags full of old clothes out on the porch for Goodwill to pick up. I asked what was in the bags and she said some of it was Aaron’s clothes.
I mention this because Aaron died in 2011. That’s right: seven years later we are still in this process, and there is more to do. And we’re fine with that pace: we decided long ago we’ll get to this when we’re ready. Much of his bedroom is still untouched. I’m sure there are people who think that’s weird or creepy, but I don’t really care. We’ll get to the rest when we’re ready.
This is my point to you Tyler: Move at your own pace. Only you know when you are ready to shed these items – and don’t let other people’s perceptions about what is a proper time frame for this sort of thing cause you to move faster than you can. Because these things are not just stuff, it is not clutter. They are your wife’s stuff, and thus they are part of your wife, and part of the life you had with her. Maybe you too will take seven years. Or maybe you’ll never be ready, and that’s fine too.
Thanks again everyone. I’d respond to each of your helpful comments, but some days I am too angry to think straight and compose nice things. I can’t seem to step away from the news and have not for months and that is, of course, making things far worse mentally.
Please know I have read and appreciate your support and suggestions. HUGZ!
If you ever need a random person, disconnected from your life, to talk to, I am here. PM me if you want my info to chat. I’m sure many others would be available too.
Someone asked me about the specifics of my wife’s decision about treatment. It made me think that I had not shared an important portion of that part of her and our story. I posted something on Facebook as that is most likely where people may pass around various theories on treatment and some being ridiculous in the extreme. So, I wanted to share it here as well:
I want to make something clear as someone asked if my wife ever considered alternative treatment at any point to avoid the multiple and varied chemotherapies and side effects she endured over both diagnoses of breast cancer. No. Not once. She researched, but her decision was always clear and emphatic.
Part of that is because her mom had been through it with many of the same doctors and survived. She trusted that and her mom. Part of it was she trusted in science and her doctors who spent decades learning the best and most effective treatments.
Chemotherapy (and her brief, but brutal course of brain radiation) is a bastard and despite the recurrence and my wife’s death at the hands of cancer, she always believed in the treatment and care her doctors prescribed until the disease and the doctor made it clear that sometimes the best treatment is going to fail. Her family and I believe that as well.
By all means, if you are faced with this, research every option you can imagine, but make sure the evidence you find is based on professionals with experience and study and the obvious caring Rebecca’s team at UAB showed. Even if there is a modicum of truth in the conspiracies that float around about various medical treatments, the individuals often don’t give a damn about that. They want to heal you and you can see it in their words and deeds.
Excellent post Tyjenks. It is frustrating that there are those out there who would use her passing to promote alternative or homeopathic therapies. My sister-in-law does this very thing, combing the Internet to find stories to validate her view and then thrusts it on others. She had a normal cyst but claimed it was cancer. Used an alternative medicine cream to “cure her of her cancer”. Never was it diagnosed and she has told who knows how many people she cured her cancer with a cream (which wasn’t cancer at all as all the women in her family have histories of cysts).
I’m always here if you need an empathetic person to talk to. I wish you lived near me as I’d bring some boardgames over to play with you and your kids.
Thanks Jeff. Ugh, that is a pretty extreme, but not unexpected example. So ridiculous.
Let me clarify further, no one has used my wife’s passing for that purpose. Someone I spoke with is at the beginning of this process with his wife and simply asked what part that consideration played in her decision to do chemotherapy. If someone did use her death in that way, my post above and on Facebook would have quite a different tone. I still have a lot of anger and something like that would have made me explode with more passion and expletives. :)
I would love to play boardgmaes with a lot of you good peeps. My time now is such that I barely play with the kids. I do have a group playing Charterstone and we are enjoying it.
Clean scans today. Almost four years out from initial treatment. I’m not really processing it yet; the weeks leading up to scans are super anxiety-producing for me and I haven’t gotten all the way through it yet.
But I don’t Facebook, so you lot are the Internet friends I’m telling today. Congrats ;)
Sidenote: Nasal debridement (warning: kinda gross medical photo in wiki link) is not fun even if you’ve been through it several times in the past. I’m pretty messed up today, bleh.
Hells yes, dog. That’s fuckin’ fantastic news. Receive my positive energy.
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Excellent! That’s really great news. Thank you for sharing with us.