18 Months

Today marks 18 months since Tim's death. It's hard to comprehend sometimes that so much time has passed. I keep referring to "last year" in reference to events with Tim. In reality in less than a week it will be the second time our wedding anniversary has passed without Tim around to celebrate it with me.

I still have some really hard days but they are finally spacing out a bit. I'm starting to catch on a bit more with work and am staying busy with it and some of the volunteer opportunities I've discovered because of it. I've also discovered that the one time I don't think so much is when my hands and mind are busy, with the warmer weather I've been capitalizing on that and have been doing lots of yardwork and projects around my house. I injured myself yesterday with what was supposed to be a simple project of moving some bushes and spreading some soil. I found that my crawlspace vents were (poorly) glued in and had begun to fall out, when pulling them out the rest of the way I found some wires hanging in the crawlspace unattached to anything on one end. We had the house rewired so I went into the crawlspace to see if I could see new wires in the same area which would indicate these could be cut off and pulled out. After winding my way over and under various ducts and pipes I also found that a lot of my insulation has fallen out and started pushing that out of the vent holes. At one point I looked up and to my right and in the darkness I saw two eyes looking back at me. I've never moved so quickly as I did at that moment diving back over and under the various obstacles on my way out. I paid for it last night and all day today, looks like the animal got itself back out of the crawlspace sometime over the night and I will be hiring out the removal and replacement of the remaining insulation after discovering my most recent roommate.

Otherwise my life has been pretty boring as of late, I'm slowly starting to decrease my medications and am still seeing my therapist on a regular basis. I've also added in acupuncture again and it really helps to stabilize and center me. As much as I hate to admit it at times, life is slowly but surely moving forward. I know I've made big strides in my recovery even in just the past year but I do still have quite a ways to go and in many ways will never be the same. I'm much more reserved in some ways, less burdened and fearful in others but an innocence and sense of invincibility have been taken from me that I will never be able to recover from. I live with the constant fear of losing someone else close to me but I'm learning to depend upon myself. I don't think I'll ever like living life alone but it isn't as scary of a prospect as it once was.

For now my reality stands that I have yet to make it through a full week without falling apart better than the every day it once was. I still miss Tim, grieve for him every single day but no longer fantasize about what could have been. It hurts too much to imagine what our lives could be now. I'm just starting to dream again for the first time in a very very long time. I have yet to dream of him but I still hold out hope that it may one day happen. Losing Tim has broken me similarly to that of a shattered vase. You can glue it all back together but all of the pieces will never fit just right, a few tiny chips will always be missing from the whole and it loses a lot of its luster, plus it just takes a really long time to try to figure out where all of the dang pieces go and broken glass always seems to slice you up no matter how careful you are...