The happy ending and the to-be-continued

Two years ago, minus a couple of weeks, I was in shambles. I stood shaking over the body of the love of my life in a cold, sterile hospital room. I choked back tears and immediately began the long and arduous journey of figuring out how to go on with my life.

The weeks and months that followed were among some of the hardest I’ve ever endured. They were more painful than childbirth, lonelier than divorce and more confusing than astrophysics.

I swore during that time that I would never love again. I couldn’t imagine living a happy life ever again. I couldn’t imagine tarnishing Jon’s beautiful memory, the amazing life we shared, the wonderful and promising future we had, by replacing him. Ever. Had you tried to tell me otherwise and I would have painted you a fool.

But as the weeks turned into months I began to wonder if it was possible. I slowly started missing the companionship of being a part of a whole. I began to feel like I was missing something. More importantly I began to realize that in cherishing Jon’s memory I was directly rejecting one of his final pleas – find happiness again.

I slowly became open to the idea that my love life was not over.

I ventured out into the world of dating with a perplexing cocktail of optimism and reluctance, fear and excitement. It was one disappointment after another. There were good men out there. Handsome men. Smart men. Accomplished men. But none were what I wanted.

Jon’s memory haunted me. Nothing would ever be that perfect again.

Just as the loneliness gave way to acceptance and plans for an untold future, the frustration turned the time back right back to where I was before. There was not life after Jon; at least not with another man.

Just as I was ready to throw in the towel and live forever alone, but monumentally surrounded by love – by the love that had left, but endured beyond the grave, by the endless love of my children, family and closest friends – I stumbled upon Josh.

We met online. That’s something I used to hate to admit. It was embarrassing. It looked like I was trying too hard. It was pathetic, almost. What was wrong with me that I couldn’t just meet someone the good ole fashioned way?

I don’t care anymore because it worked.

Josh was the last person I saw before I clicked on the “deactivate” button. I saw his profile and paused. Maybe just one more.

It wasn’t his picture that captured me. He was handsome, but so young looking. It was his job – a history professor – that captured me. Two of the most amazing people I know are history professors. They are not only exceedingly intelligent – a quality I hold above all others – but also fun, relaxed, down to earth and open-minded. They were the coolest, most admirable people I knew. If he shared even any of their qualities, he was worth a second look.

So, I set about the annoying process of talking to him. There were the round of three multiple-choice questions. I don’t remember his answers or even the questions, but I must have approved of his answers. Then there were the “must-haves” and “can’t stands,” which always went completely ignored. Then the open-ended questions. Again, I don’t remember what the questions were or how he answered, but I must have been amused. So I went on to the messaging phase.

We quickly exchanged phone numbers and began texting. Then came the first phone call. We spent more than four hours on the phone that night. I will never forget them. Hours felt like minutes and before we knew it, it was the middle of the night and we both reluctantly hung up the phone. We both could have stayed on the phone all night, but life doesn’t allow for all-nighters on the phone. Nor do phone batteries.

We did that again two more times. By the third night we were chomping at the bit to see each other. We’d have probably both driven to one another in the middle of the night that last phone call, but he was in Kentucky at a history conference and I was home in Florida.

Josh hopped an earlier flight to get home sooner to meet me.

I already had plans. Ironically, it was a pre-arranged date with someone else I felt too loyal to cancel. I spent the whole day gnashing my teeth wanting to cancel and take him instead. I stuck to my guns and went on that date thinking of nothing but him the whole time.

The next day we met, finally. We had only been speaking a few days, but I felt like I had known him for years.

I pulled up to his house that afternoon. We planned to watch one of the World Cup games together. It meant next to nothing to him, but he watched me get riled up and excited. Angry when our team was losing, thrilled when they bounded back.

At one point I had come to the point where it was either, stop drinking so I could go home or crash on his couch. He nervously offered to let me stay making sure to be clear he wasn’t expecting anything. Normally I would have put down the beer and called it a day, but something told me it was OK to stay. So I did.

I practically never left after that night.

We stayed up until the wee hours of the morning talking. We shared entire lifetimes of experiences. At the end of the night we had shared intimate secrets, but still had not kissed. I was disappointed. Finally as we headed back inside to call it a night I looked at him.

Suave as he could probably muster he just looked at me and smiled and said, “oh, you want a kiss?” And like a lost schoolgirl I giddily said, “yeah.” And that was that. We spent only a few nights apart after that.

That was a little over a year ago. Since then he’s met my children, my dad, my mom and all of my friends. He’s seen me go to the bathroom and examined boo-boos. We’ve moved in together, picked out paint colors, shared household duties, adopted a puppy and mastered the art of cohabitating.

Then, just three nights ago, he proposed. I said yes.

Ours is truly a story of what can happen if you’re patient. He wasn’t just the right guy. He wasn’t just a nice guy. He was THE guy.

I told him about Jon and, unlike the other guys I had dated, he didn’t cringe or squirm. He thought it was a beautiful story and he asked questions and wanted to know about Jon. On the anniversary of Jon’s death, just one month after we had started dating, he took me out for the day to take my mind off of what was the biggest of all anniversaries.

We found a $20 bill just laying on the ground at Malibu Grand Prix. We had literally just walked by the area and nothing was there. No one else had come or gone, but there it was. Josh picked it up and said, “hey, thanks Jon.”

To this day Jon is a part of our lives. There are photos of him. The kids talk about him. And it never gives Josh even a moment of hesitation. He doesn’t want me to stop loving Jon because he knows I can still love him too. He wants me to remember and cherish those days because he recognizes something Jon too recognized – the bad things that happen in our lives can shape us into better people if we let them. Josh helped me turn a senseless tragedy into the ultimate learning experience and, ultimately, the best homage I could ever pay to the love I lost.

Josh helped me through the anxiety I still suffered following Jon’s death. He bought me a book on panic attacks. He encouraged me to get counseling. He practiced all the meditations and new behaviors I was told to learn. When I cried, he held me. When I needed to talk, he listened. When I needed to be alone, he took the kids for a walk.

He has been my savior.

But yet when he proposed I couldn’t help but feel a pang of regret, guilt even. Ironically the day he proposed was the same day Jon and I started dating. He didn’t know that at the time.  But I told him and didn’t think for a second I shouldn’t. He understood the symbolism behind that.

I worry about Jon’s friends and family thinking this is too soon. I worry it is some how an insult to those people. But in my heart I know this is right. Part of my even thinks Jon had a hand in the whole thing.

The bottom line is, there are happy endings. Even when happy endings seem so unlikely. The world threw me the ultimate hard ball, but my repayment for healing and learning and remembering was a love just as good as the love Jon and I shared.

I hesitate to say, but it may even be stronger for it. Jon and I could have and would have spent the rest of our lives together. Ours would have been a happy marriage. I’m still sad I was robbed of that and even sadder Jon had to leave this world to miss the amazing experiences that have come since his death and all those that will follow.

I watch Josh and I’s new puppy play with Jon and I’s no longer puppy and I think, “gosh, Jon would have loved this.” It makes me sad.

But I’m so much stronger now. I’ve accomplished so much in his memory. And Josh has been at the wheel for the past year. I dreamt of my happy ending and now I’m living it.

Out of the depths of darkness rises light. I can’t wait to marry Josh. I dream of all that will come of our lives. We daydream about being a power couple, but what we miss in the excitement is, we already are.

Thank you to all who have endured this journey with me. To all of my friends who have held my hands through grief, loneliness, sadness, panic attacks and even drama, I couldn’t have done this without you.

My journey is not over, it’s only just begun. I can’t wait to write more of the happy ending and continue to prove that it is possible to love two people all at the same time.

One does not diminish the other.

Hiding made it worse

I haven’t done this in a long time. At least not publicly. I’ve written several times in the past several months, but I’ve kept my various musings to myself. Often I’ve been private with my thoughts out of respect for the new players in my story – most notably my now live-in boyfriend.

I’ve kept my thoughts hush-hush because they were often so personal it seemed foolish to post them for all to see. I’ve even sometimes kept them quiet because I thought maybe no one cared.

But most importantly, I kept my thoughts on the DL because I no longer thought they were helpful to anyone but me. When I started the blog, I did so because I wanted to write my thoughts, in painful, agonizing honesty. I could have done that privately and the effect would have been all the same for me, but I felt obligated to do more than that.

I put my deepest, darkest, sometimes most embarrassing thoughts out in the world of the internet because I thought maybe someone, somewhere was experiencing something similar to me. Maybe knowing that I felt bat shit crazy at times might make them feel a little less bat shit crazy. That seemed a wonderful solace to an otherwise unimaginable situation.

Give back, my brain kept willing me. So I continued to tell the world that my still grieving mind became obsessed with literally replacing Jon. It’s something I cringed to admit, but I bet I wasn’t the only one in these shoes to feel that way.

I talked about missing sex. Yeah, try putting that out there for potentially millions of people, including people like, say, your grandparents or parents, to read. It’s not an easy thing to swallow, but I did it because maybe someone else wondered why they would think about sex when they should be grieving.

Throughout the past nearly 20-months I have thought just about anything you can imagine to avoid feeling the pain that came with Jon’s loss. Sex. Companionship. Work. New careers. Going back to school. Lavish vacations. Random hobbies. Anything but facing that lingering lump in the back of my throat. Anything to take away the image of blue lips and fading life.

Anything but that terrifying night.

So, why am I writing again? Because I now realize the cost of that avoidance. It took falling in love again and hundreds of dollars in therapy (that tab will climb into the thousands no doubt) to figure out just what my fleeing mind was buying me.

Let’s start with anxiety. I had my first panic attack a couple of months after Jon’s death. I couldn’t tell you what triggered it in that moment, but what I know is I thought I was going to join him in the afterlife. It took two very good and loyal friends and a couple of cups of hot tea to finally feel like my chest wasn’t going to collapse.

More followed. Over and over. Each time I thought I was going to collapse never to wake up again. Just like Jon. The feeling sent me to a strange emergency room in Orlando. It sent me to a walk-in clinic for a round of un-necessary tests confirming that, no, I was not dying. It took me to the pharmacy to fill a prescription of Xanax to push the anxiety out of the way.

More avoidance.

By the time a new love came into my life I had become so good at avoiding I thought I was better. I savored every single second of falling again. Falling in love with him was the most incredible feeling I think I’ve ever experienced, save maybe for childbirth. Not that I love him anymore than I love Jon (I’m intentionally not using the past tense), it’s just that it was so much more savory the second time around. I never thought I would feel that again, yet there I was, enamored, speechless. My heart fluttered and it wasn’t because of panic. My stomach did flip-flops when I saw him and it wasn’t anxiety.

I got to enjoy that feeling for far too short a time before the panic and anxiety overcame me again.

We had made the decision, probably far more prematurely than conventional wisdom holds, to move in together. One day when we were shopping for paint colors for the home we were planning to move into it hit me again. Like a violent punch to the head the dizziness came rushing back. The world spinned and I was on the verge of losing consciousness. Probably not really, but that’s how it felt. My chest tightened, my breath grew shallow and my heart raced while simultaneously feeling like it had stopped altogether. And it all circled and overcame me in unison. I was powerless to stop it.

It happened like that for months. It would come on in the most unexpected of places and scenarios. There didn’t seem to be triggers. Over time I learned to push the anxiety down. I learned how to not let it turn into a full-blown panic attack, but it became, more and more with each passing day, a constant struggle to keep it at bay.

I was never at peace, always waiting for the next panic attack. Sleep was my only solace. But then that got taken away.

The panic and anxiety started creeping its way into bedtime. My pillow became a prison where the second I lay my head down, no matter how good I felt, no matter how tired I was, dizziness and fear overcame my every thought. Each time I got close to drifting to sleep, my mind jerked me back to the dark room.

It was worse at that hour. There was no one to talk to. Nothing to distract me from the panic. The house was quiet and I couldn’t snap to my typical therapies to trick my mind. Doing the dishes at 3 in the morning would surely wake and worry someone in the house. Laundry was out of the question. I was too tired to work. So I just laid there most nights, staring at the ceiling, trying to learn how to live with the panic.

The nights when I did sleep, there were nightmares. Sleep evaded me nearly every single night. It made me irritable to my kids and to my new partner in this world. It made me distracted during work. It made my quality of work suffer. Everything around me was falling victim to my unrelenting anxiety.

One morning I couldn’t take it anymore. The exhaustion of going months without a decent night’s sleep had made it literally painful to function. I was so tired all I could think of was sleep. But I couldn’t sleep because my brain wouldn’t let me.

That’s when I decided to swallow my pride, admit that this isn’t normal, or OK and get help. Enter the expensive therapy.

I’m about a month and a half in at this point. The weekly sessions were giving me a decent amount of relief. I fell asleep just a little sooner and woke up in the middle of the night just a little less often, but sleep was still a place I feared. I still wasn’t getting the rest I needed.

We spent time talking about stress I could control. We talked about getting into healthier sleep habits. The bed is for sleep and sex, I was told. No more laptop in bed. No more episodes of House of Cards late at night to entertain my insomnia. If you can’t sleep, get out of bed and do something supremely boring until you can think of nothing better than sleep.

No more caffeine. No alcohol past dinner. Chamomile, OK, but the honey in it no. Establish a bedtime. Get up at the same time every day. It was a long list. But it helped even though I cheated from time to time.

And then there was this realization: I’m afraid to sleep.

Falling asleep is something people don’t really notice happening. Kind of like you don’t notice your brain telling you to breath or your heart to pump. These are basic functions of life that just happen. We know our brain is at the control panel, but we don’t actually feel it happening.

But I could when it came time for bed. I could feel every beat of my heart and every compression of my lungs and when I started to drift off, I felt it happening. The second I felt it, I would become – still become – filled with fear. That’s when I’d jerk myself back into the land of the living. Sleep, I had apparently decided, is where people go to die.

This all came out today. I won’t get into too many more specifics, but the revelation led me into a two-hour session instead of a one-hour session and hosted in a series of exercises aimed at redirecting my thoughts. Replacing the bad with the good. Keeping good memories and learning to cope with the bad.

To do that I was hoisted into that terrifying night over and over. I was told to remember it in pain staking detail. The parts that most terrified and upset me, remember those the most. Feel them. Let them consume me. That’s what I had to do.

I was in tears, inconsolable. It hurt like a thousand knives tearing into the flesh around my heart. My throat ached with dread. My brain reeled painful memory after painful memory and for the first time since Jon died I truly confronted what I had avoided for nearly two years.

I wasn’t able to stop it. I wasn’t able to slow it. I couldn’t get up and wash a dish or go for a bike ride. I had to sit there and let it consume me. When it was all done I sat on a couch in my therapist’s office with a lap full of soaked tissues. My eyes burned from crying, but I still wanted to cry more.

I was consumed with heartache. But the one thing that wasn’t there for the first time in as long as I can remember was anxiety.

I imagine it will come back at some point. But for now it’s gone. I’m still sad. I took myself on an emotional rollercoaster confronting demons I had spent months and months warding off. The panic was a result of that.

I don’t know how long it will take me to really beat this, but I do know one thing. I’ve never been so happy to cry. The liberation of living, for the first time in months, without constant panic and anxiety, is worth a good cry. I don’t like remembering what happened that night. It hurts like hell to think about and fills me with sorrow, but sorrow, I’ve learned, is better than panic. And the best part is, if I just keep letting the sadness come out, eventually it won’t be so painful.

I thought being sad was some sort of loss. I thought I had somehow been defeated if I didn’t carry on like the good little trooper everyone thought I was. But I was fooling you all and, worse, I was fooling myself. I’m not being defeated by being sad, I’m healing.

I just wish I had discovered this much, much earlier.