Warning this is a hard post that I feel needs trigger warning, but I am not sure which ones. Talking about end of life. Four years ago yesterday, Michaela and I sat in her oncologists office and were told that the main spot of cancer was shrinking.

I think the DMV gets a bad wrap. Just like attorneys often get a bad wrap. Not every DMV employee is horrible. Not every attorney is a horrible person.

This past week Michaela and I would have been celebrating 21 years together. In therapy, I was reading all Michaela’s messages from Facebook and some she penned to me privately. 

I made a trip to the ER recently. I am fine. I strained the Achilles tendon falling down my front porch stairs. I am feeling fine now. The trip to the ER though was waves of grief hitting.

I think of her almost every moment of the day as there is always this piece that feels like I am missing. Like she should be here in that moment experiencing what I am

I want to put all our memories on repeat and I don’t want to forget them either so I feel like doing these things again even without her here, helps me keep them close. With grief there is so much fog.

There was one of those things on Facebook about who would you go on vacation with and it tags all the people that pop up first when you do the @. This is the silly little thing that was floating around.

A month of dates. 

Yesterday was the first of the month. I was up as it hit midnight and turned to the first of May. I whispered, “Happy Anniversary, baby.” See the first of EVERY month has meaning to me.

I was standing up about to walk to the kitchen to get a cup of coffee, but as soon as the commercial started, I turned and yelled “Fuck you” at the TV. The commercial that started playing was for DaVinci medical robots.

Every little thing reminds me of her this morning. Honestly every day is like this, but going to use this morning to explain it. Sunday mornings were usually chill days with M.

Recently I started listening to a podcast called Rewatcher. It is about the popular late 90’s tv series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I loved that series and hadn’t watched it in years so with the podcast discussing it

Grief is like an earthquake. It really is - my whole world falling and breaking apart. I bend over to pick pieces off the floor and whatever it was before - isn’t even recognizable now.

I haven’t been out of the house much this month. My grief and depression are playing off of each other. One of my coping mechanisms is reading. I read to escape my life. I read a ton of books to escape my pain.

Is it just always the would have been? “It would have been…” her 52 birthday…our 19th anniversary and so on with each birthday and anniversaries. I will now have a “would have been” life.

I cancelled our cell phone plan and signed up with another company in my name.

Last nights meltdown came from installing a new router and modem. Michaela and I are big Star Wars fans.

We were always mushy and romantic even in everyday simple moments. It is just us. My sisters would sometimes tease us we were so mushy.

I haven’t done a deep cleaning of my house in almost 2 years. I have been tackling areas now. It has felt good to clean some areas and make them look all sparkly.

This is exactly how it feels. All of it.