3…

So here I am, 3 years out, 3 years of living life without my husband, 3 years of living life as a widow

3 years of living life as a single parent

3 years…

It’s still so surreal, yet not

They say grief changes, it evolves they say. I say “they” are correct

For me, this time of year will never be the same, but then again, anytime of year, any month, day, hour, minute will ever be the same. Life changes when you lose your partner, everything changes but most of all, YOU change!

I am no longer a wife, I am no longer the woman I was with Glenn. I had no choice but to step out into life and start participating. I have kids, young adults to raise. The girls are now 16, 19 and 21 years young. This means they were 13, 16, and 18 when they lost their Dad. Try and imagine that if you have kids of your own. Think back to when you were a teenager, what was life like for you? Were you close with your parents at this age? Did you want to spend time with your parents? If you’re honest, then most likely you were like any other teenager, figuring out who you were separate from your parents, the natural course of life. Pretty much taking any opportunity you could to get away from your parents, seeking your peers for connections. Then try and imagine your Mom or Dad is gone, never to be seen or heard from again and you have to watch your other parent struggle to just try and function every day, never mind take over every single responsibility of the household overnight. And somewhere in the middle of all of this chaos, you probably feel like you should be feeling sad, perhaps you feel like you should be in your room crying? Or maybe you don’t know what the Hell is going on and you’re just trying to live your life, but somehow you know that something is off and society expects something of you. If you can’t imagine it then good for you, that is excellent! That means you didn’t have to experience it. I can barely imagine it, at 52years old, I still have both my parents on this earth with me. So through all my grief, and all my trauma and all of my loss and trying to figure out how to navigate this new life, I also try to figure out how to best treat/parent my kids. How to give them the space they need to grieve in their own way or maybe not grieve at all because they just don’t know how to yet. Maybe they need to let life happen, unfold and figure things out and not have people set expectations about how they should feel, because one thing teenagers do well is observe. They are smart and they know exactly what is happening. They may not be equipped to talk about it, they may not be well versed in it but they feel it all! What this looks like from a Mom’s perspective is anxiety, depression, low self esteem, and panic attacks. Oh and throw in a pandemic, just for fun, why not, in the middle of your senior year of High School for one of my daughters. At 3 years since my husband died I am tired, so very tired of trying to figure this shit out. I’m tired of trying to be the perfect parent or even a half way good one. I’m tired of worrying about judgement from family members who have long forgotten what my kids voices sound like. I am struggling with raising 3 young adults who lost their Dad in the middle of really not particularly liking him. There I said it….we were not a Hallmark family when my husband got sick with Pancreatic Cancer, suffered for 9 months and died a disgustingly horrific death. We were a family with 3 teenage girls who were already struggling with anxiety and depression, low self esteem and the gamut, not much different from most teens at some point in their development. If you speak with someone today as a seasoned adult and they tell you a story about losing their Dad or Mom at 13 through 18 years old, ask them what those first few years were like? Ask them how they felt, because chances are they won’t remember much but what they will recall is watching the parent left behind. If they were lucky their Mom or Dad was able to find happiness again and that showed them that there is life after loss. Hopefully that showed them what resiliency and strength and courage look like and in the process this gave them something they needed very much….HOPE.

So this is where I am today, 3 years after losing Glenn. I am in the middle of yet another paradigm shift. My focus is on living the best life I can, not just to do well by Glenn but even more important, to do well by my kids.