In Lieu of Flowers…this sentence is usually finalized with all the many ways you can help honor the death of a loved one. Here I am on the eve of another December 3rd, and all I want to share is how much gratitude I have for the man who left me here and the village that responded since his departure. Two years of this grief gravy! 

Speaking of gravy, I chopped the end of my finger off whilst preparing the Thanksgiving turkey this year. I did what any good mother would do and worked with the other nine so dinner wasn’t ruined. I did offer a reward of $5 if anyone found it in the gravy.

I took myself to the urgent care the day after and showed the sweet nurse my finger like a child who fell on the playground. I basically paid a $35 copay for another mom to put neosporin and a bandaid on it. And it was healed up within a day, only mildly misshapen for life, but thankfully no gangrene. Healing can be so quick on the surface. 

Grief in year two is much deeper than a superficial cut. You don’t get to walk around with the bandage and have people ask what happened or how you are doing. I carry my wound much deeper now. It smolders in my soul now. It never leaves me.

I still ask every day, “what the hell just happened?” Like it is the same dreary Sunday morning after Thanksgiving when my husband walked out the door and said he needed to go for a walk to clear his head. Except now I do know what happened. I do have the benefit of hindsight and information left behind to help me piece together his mental illness and distress. Hindsight is a bitch. No matter how many times I go back to save him, the outcome is still the same. 

My therapist taught me to sit with the healthy version of my husband and ask him what he would say to me when I am a wreck with this pain that is unique only to suicide survivors. The kind of pain where you beat yourself up for not knowing what you couldn’t possibly have known. The kind of pain where you question your own value on the planet if you can’t even save the person you knew the best of anyone.  What would he say? I know that Erik would tell me and his family and his friends to live and love our beautiful lives.

I feel so blessed by all the big and small ways my cup has been filled by my village. To my kids, who watched me paint my bedroom pink and said it was pretty, you should have said something! LOL. But thank you for letting me process my stuff and I know it wasn’t always pretty. To the friends who came to my house in the middle of the trauma storm and witnessed the very depths of our pain, thank you and I am sorry for the secondary trauma you carry now. I know you were affected by it and I hope you find your purpose with our pain and use it to love others the way you helped us.

To my colleagues (also my friends) who let me be the absent minded professor for this chapter of my career, thank you for leading me along and letting me feel safe and loved at work. Thank you for telling me where to park and what time the meeting starts and leaving treats on my desk. 

To my sister, you are the best second husband I could have ever married. You are the actual wind beneath my wings. I would have made you do the bandaid if you were in town but I am glad you and Tom are making new memories of these holidays we get to hate together now.

To the friends who make me dance and laugh and drink prosecco and wear leather pants, thank you for letting me be joyful with you. To my friends who text at any hour and let me say anything and everything, thank you for your presence. To the friends and family that miss Erik with me and remind me of his life, thank you for remembering the best of him for me and his kids.

To all my new friends since he died that accept this big part of my story and still want to hang out with me, thank you for letting me feel normal. To the strangers like the man on the airplane who comforted me after I told him through tears that I had no one to tell that we landed, thank you for being like Jesus and loving the orphan and the widow. 

So in lieu of flowers, your love is the gift that keeps me going. Two years feels like a lot of healing and also like it was just yesterday. I am thankful for every silver lining, every rainbow, every gesture, every lesson learned from this horrible tragedy. I am healing and I am forever broken. Living my life in the “and” of it all now. Not sure how this turned into an acceptance speech for my Most Widowy Widow award, but thank you to the Academy.