Thursday January 2, 2020

Good evening! Wow, so much great dialogue here today.

Liz, as always, thinking of you and your family. Anne, I think often of you too, and how you are navigating a changed life. Grief is unknowable looking in from the outside, but I want to say, however clumsy, that in the words of Lin Manuel Miranda, I see you "living with the unimaginable". Others have been there, I have not. But I offer my heartfelt acknowledgement of what you are losing/have lost, and my support/admiration for the determination/strength with which you face it.

I am encouraged by all of the reports of downward trends on weight. Bonnie I so relate to your struggles with stringing many "good" days together. This continues to be an enigma to me: how can it be so easy, so automatic, to treat myself well by eating healthy, delicious food, until BOOM, it's not.

Puppies at WW studio! I want puppies at every meeting I go to or facilitate, especially IEP meetings. Knowing there would be a puppy would take the sting out of arriving to work at 7am for said meetings.

Thanks Diane for collecting our words. I thought I might use the Wordle application. But I will be honest, might not get to it for some time. I'm swamped at work, head underwater, breathing through a straw. All of my IEP due dates are clumped together this year. I will be sitting pretty this spring, once I get there :) While others may be scrambling to get meetings scheduled in April and May, I will be skipping out of the building at the actual end of the contract day, instead of staying late every night.

Happy with my eating yesterday and, so far today. I so, so love feeling in control. Soothes my soul.

DD, thank you so much for your kind thoughts about "living with the unimaginable."

Yes, my husband's death was unimaginable, as parts of all our lives are. For a year and a half after he died I lived in "the fog of grief," a phrase that seems a fitting description of our struggles to understand and accommodate the unimaginable.

But now, eight days before the second anniversary of his death, his absence has become less unimaginable. Even if I don't fully understand it, I have become more skilled at living with his absence, making room for it, succeeding sometimes even to compartmentalize the loss of him in my daily life.

In all of this my husband is my role model. When we met, he had been widowed for only six months. His wife had died of cancer. For several years, while working full-time, he'd also been her caregiver and in grief groups before and following her death.

I thought his alleged recovery was hurried, too swift, but he didn't, although he repeatedly said, "I never want to go through that again." Gradually, I learned to accept his timeline and ways of grieving as he moved forward, as we fell wildly in love and married only three months later. Supportive of his grieving process, I promised him that he could die first.

I kept that promise. I'm so, so grateful that he didn't have to suffer a second unimaginable, because now I know its cost. And now, at the start of this new year, albeit moving more slowly than he did, I'm also ready to move forward.

This weekend our Paula, who also lost a dear husband, is marrying her new love. We all rejoice with her, because love really is the point to life--old loves and new ones--our loves and others'.

For it's love, all kinds of love, even the possibility of love that makes our too-short lives most worthwhile.

Thank you, Ann, for those beautiful thoughts.

Okay, so I decided to share this to make it post #41 or so for the day! LOL!

20 something Delivery guy comes today with washer/dryer set, gets out of his truck and comes up to me saying, "Dude you are big! Did you play football in school?" I say no. He says, "You should have. You would have kicked ass." Then he goes on to say he does some body building and they talk about a person's frame as so important. He looks at me and says, "You've got a great frame for that. You are built."

Now mind you, I was a bit taken back when he comes at me saying you're big, but once I realized what he meant I have to say I was super, super pleased. Talk about a compliment coming from a 20 something kid who is built like a brick house. Made me feel pretty good about my work at the gym.

Woohoo!!!

Devon, that post makes me GRIN! Yes, you are BUILT!

And you built yourself.

:)