Ouch

That’s the sound my heart is making today. Ouch! OUCH! Son-of-a-….! OWWWWWWW! Four months. He’s been gone for four months. What even is time?

I’ve been working really hard on the back garden and have it pretty much completed (now it’s just maintenance). There’s something about working really hard to see the fruits of one’s efforts. I remember in grad school, winter and summer breaks were a flurry of crafting and baking because I wanted to have a beginning, middle, and end to something that I could see, touch, taste. It’s not terribly gratifying to see a stapled paper with red marks on it as the culmination of months of work. Maybe that’s why I’ve been doing the avoidance dance with the piles of paperwork on my dining room table and the materials from Bryan’s office on a folding table in the living room. The work in the garden has been heavy labor, hard work in the sunshine, and the results are beautiful. Sorting through paper, contacting businesses, and sorting through 25 years of a career that belonged to someone I loved is not beautiful–necessary, but not beautiful.

My sister has encouraged me to turn my attention to the office items. She’s right when she says I’ll feel better in my home once that table is out of here. I’ve been doing bits and pieces over the last several months, but what do you do with 18 years of wooden boats calendars that Bryan clearly loved? He kept them all from 2002 to 2020. It feels sacrilegious to put them in the recycle bin. But what am I going to do with them? How do I honor something he loved and treasured when it is a stack in the middle of my living room right now? I have a lot more compassion for folks who end up with piles of things they don’t know what to do with. Things become fraught with weight, sorrow, a desire to do the right thing and no where to put them.

Sunday was such a high, good day. Today is really hard. And that seems to be the way of it. And I keep surfing these waves.