hogglestock

There is no getting around it. After over a year and half, grief is something that is with me pretty much every hour. The intensity of it varies and shifts, and joy and contentment are still possible, but it’s always there somewhere.

Some of the things I’ve had trouble coming to terms with is how I keep John’s memory alive and what part of his life is my responsibility to keep alive. John had a pretty important position in his field and he was largely closeted, so his work world hasn’t really known how to deal with me. Even though his work was very much a part of my life for 20 years, I was not a part of his work world. This was the easiest to let go of. His work legacy will live on without my intervention, so that can just be what it is.

He also had 39 years of life before he met me, so I was faced with boxes of letters and photos and other things from people and parts of his life that are largely unknown to me. There are vacation snapshots of views I never saw or people I don’t recognize. We have no kids. There is no museum of John. All of our stuff is going to be landfill at some point.

I went through these mementos, kept the ones that made sense to me, and put the rest out in the trash. But the night I put the trash can out on the curb for collection the next morning, I was in bed and suddenly felt like I was throwing John’s memory away. I ran out in the middle of the night and dug the bag out of the garbage. After a few weeks I opened the bag and sorted all the correspondence out by sender. I had to ask his family who some people were, and for a few they didn’t know, I had to do some sleuthing online to figure out who people were. I ended up sending these stacks of letters and cards back to the people who sent them to John over the decades. Family, friends, old boyfriends. Hopefully they appreciated getting these mementoes of their own past, but it was also fitting reminder of John and their relationships with him. Now that he is gone, I can never know those 39 years before me, but returning those letters and photos gave me a some bit of closure, at least on that front.

One of the things I found was a postcard that John had purchased before he met me. It was one that I had also purchased before I met John and had hanging on the wall in my office.

When I had friends over for dinner who all knew John before they knew me, I pulled out these napkins that John had gotten at India Hicks’ shop on Harbour Island in the Bahamas. Both the island and shop had been on John’s bucket list for a long time and we finally got there in January 2022, just a few months before he died. Using these napkins that he never had the chance to use was heartbreaking.

With persistent low grade depression and higher level anxiety, I decided I could probably use some therapy. One of the things that has come out of those sessions is I came up with the notion (apparently not a unique one) that maybe the grief is a gift. Not in the sense of something that someone wants, but that it is an intense reminder of intense joy. Not that the grief brings joy, but that without it it would be too easy to forget the joy we shared. It is a pretty helpful notion. It doesn’t make the grief any less, but it does kind of help in coping with it.

Although Covid probably played a role in John’s death, the two years we had at home together because of it were an amazing for us. We were lucky enough to be safely working from home, John’s work travel went from 50% to 0%, and we loved every minute of it. Of course we had our moments of being stir crazy, but to spend all that time together, enjoying the seasons, and our garden, and Lucy, was truly a gift. We talked about how the experience had proven that we had nothing to fear about the togetherness that retirement would bring. He was four years short of that retirement when he died and now I am facing a retirement alone instead of with my soul mate.

In Mexico in 2019

I don’t want any of you to think I’m not okay. I’m doing pretty well. I know I’ll be okay in the long run. I just need to figure out anew what my life is and who I am.