For some definition of well

I'd taken a few weeks off from therapy to go kayaking on Sandy's birthday and prepare for the RSVP bike ride. Those weeks were both good and bad from a grieving standpoint, but the despair I felt in Vancouver, B.C., continued to haunt me in the days that followed. I wondered if I'd stalled or slid backwards or otherwise wasn't quite where a widow ought to be at 13 months.

As I told my therapist, I'd recognized that I believed I could move on, past the pain, but that I was choosing not to. I suspected I could stop begging Sandy to return, stop scouring quantum physics books for as-yet-unrecognized options, stop willing there to be a change in the timeline. I could, that is, accept that the unthinkable had happened, buck up, and go forward. It's not that I can't do that. It's that I won't.

She had an unreadable look on her face. Though she doesn't often lecture me, I fully expected her to tell me it was time to pull myself together. I peered at her, and said, "You're thinking this woman is crazy and it's time to get the train back on the track, aren't you?"

She laughed and said, "No, I was actually thinking how well you're doing."

Well was not a word that particularly resonated for me at that moment. I'm highly functional, socially competent, even coherent again, but the pain continues day after day. The emptiness, the feeling of betrayal. The disappointment when my close friends react to things in ways that make perfect sense for who they are but that accentuate how different everyone else is from Sandy. (And let's be clear: it's her responses I crave, even the ones that would have confused or frustrated me.) Every day brings its own challenges and fresh moments of pain, even among opportunities for laughter and the lovely memories and Sandy-writings and the like that people are generous enough to share with me.

Seven years ago today, three kittens, young enough to have
blue eyes, arrived in our lives. You never know what life will
bring, so maybe it's worth sticking around to find out.

So I asked my therapist to explain why she thinks I'm doing well. She said she was impressed that I am able to be so "alive" in my pain. That I haven't run from it, denied it, or distracted myself from it. That I've been able to feel it now rather than letting it fester underneath a facade. That in feeling it, I haven't lost myself or my ability to function. In short, that I let myself grieve.

I mentioned the remark to a dear friend last night, and she enthusiastically seconded it, expounding on it with her own observations of my ability to be present in my grief from the moment of Sandy's death.

So maybe I am doing okay. Maybe I don't need to measure myself against some idea that by the time a year has passed, I should be "over it." And of course, I don't ever expect to be over it. The pain is much less now than it was a year ago, and my connection to Sandy feels stronger than it did then. So maybe that's what I can aim for: less pain and more connection as I stumble through the weeks, months, and years to come.