With the antiques shop & used book store John and I started and that I’m now running on my own, my social work job, my volunteer activities – and my frequent grief-stricken meltdowns – I don’t do much that’s particularly fun or enjoyable.

— I love my social work job, but all of the client traumas and dynamics get me wound up and emotionally exhausted where they never did before John killed himself.

— The shop is an enormous amount of work that was supposed to be John’s retirement once it started making money and we no longer had to subsidize it with our salaries, but I enjoy it because the financial pieces  – the budgeting and spreadsheets etc – use the more logical, mathematical side of my brain that I need to stay balanced.

— And I’m committed to volunteering as I always have, although I’ve limited those activities significantly and only serve on a couple of boards, rather than half a dozen or more.

— I’m not ready to give any of these up.

If it wasn’t for our dogs (there are now just two of them, since John’s little wire-haired dachshund Buddy died a few months after John did), I probably wouldn’t leave the house except for the activities listed above.  But the poor pups are home alone far too much and they need to get out and greet the world, and see people other than me, and sniff exciting new scents (and poop) other than those same old smells they sniff every day for hours on end in the house and in our yards.

Tonight I was walking the two of them (Rudi and Millie) at a local veteran’s park and had this sudden thought that “it would have been nice if John and I could have come here once in a while”.  After all, the park is only a mile from our home.

That thought was immediately followed by, “but we never did anything”.  John was always too tired, or in too much pain, to want to go anywhere… even for a walk.  And I hadn’t realized before how much our lives had changed so drastically over the years, and how deeply he had slipped into his depression – and drinking far too much – without me realizing it.

I knew he was sick.  After all, I’d dragged him from doctor to doctor and lived through him being hospitalized near death five years before he actually died.  John had many ailments, and was also being monitored for possible lung cancer, which the doctors hadn’t definitively diagnosed, but which John believed he had.

I knew he was in severe pain at times.  I knew he had demons that plagued him that he didn’t talk about.  But I just didn’t see now devastatingly, bone-numbingly exhausting it all was for him, because he didn’t complain much, and he worked hard at putting on a facade to give the impression that it was all manageable.

And now, even though I miss him desperately and am in tears writing this, I realize what a nightmare it was for me, too.  I did everything I could to make his life easier for him.  I took on projects that should have been his, even though I was already exhausted and stretched beyond anyone’s normal limits.

But it wasn’t ever enough; it couldn’t ever be enough.  I lived with a constant anxiety and sense of foreboding. I was terrified that I would come home one evening and find him dead – and he knew how afraid I was of that possible scenario.

Then one day, that over-riding fear that had colored nearly everything I thought and felt and acted on for years, finally came to pass.  The unimaginable happened, and at times it makes me so sick to my very soul that I’m a sobbing puddle on the floor, hurting so badly I want to vomit.

And I’m left with horrible guilt, unending sadness, terrible loneliness – and an ever-so-small amount of relief.