UNDONE - This is what 18 months looks like

Yesterday was 18 months that he's been gone. I thought about it all day yesterday, but the pain hit today. Today the memories of the day after would not leave me alone. I woke up early and told my girls that their father was never coming back. I went to the office to keep the appointment I had made for 9:30 a.m.; they  never showed up. The office is where I fell apart the first time. I stood there in complete disbelief that he would leave me to figure out how to do all of this alone. Then, I went to the funeral home to answer a hundred questions about how I wanted his obituary and picked a casket. Picking the casket is where I fell apart the second time, how do you get past the pain of knowing the person you love most in this life is going to be buried in that box in the ground. The memories are so real that I still can still feel them. I wonder if I will always feel them. For the longest time, I kept flashing back to the hospital staff performing CPR and them yelling CLEAR every 2 minutes and the surgeon asking me what I want to do. Over the last 7 months I've been able to keep my mind busy enough to not constantly think about it. But, when the T.V. is on and CPR starts or doctors using AED happens, IT ALL COMES BACK. Will it always feel like this? I don't know for sure, but I'm beginning to think that no matter what I do or how far I go it will always sneak up on me. Love like that doesn't die. 

It has been 3 months since I wrote "Ruined by True Love" at 15 months (Ruined by True Love) and I have to say not  a lot has changed in the past 3 months. I have made small steps at developing a new normal for me and the girls. We've worked on making some new traditions and letting go of old ones. I've started listening to music again. Some days I can listen for an hour and some days the first song hits me and I'm done. 

I'm trying to figure out who I am without him; it's not an easy task. I was married at 18, somehow during the process of 18 years of marriage a lot of who we are was dependent on each other. So I'm learning to look at what WE liked and did together and figure out what I still like and want to do, alone. I often wonder if he could see me now, what he would see. 

The whole process feels like I'm coming UNDONE, like pieces of me are being taken apart and reassembled into something different. Not better or worse and probably not a lot different because we were so compatible, but it's still different. Some days I feel a little hopeful that I'm figuring out who I am, many days it just feels wrong because I shouldn't be figuring out who I am alone. 

The moral of the story is still at 18 months into this journey I am only able to take this a day at a time and I'm o.k. with that.