Starting again
Since my parents died, I’ve been reading tons of books on grieving. (I jokingly call it my grief library, and for months my “favorites” sat front and center on our living room table.) In one of the books, the author recommended for grievers what she called the “vomit test:” If doing something related to your loved ones, such as packing away their stuff or turning off their phone, makes you feel like vomiting, you’re not ready yet and you shouldn’t do it.
Thinking of writing on this blog didn’t make me feel sick to my stomach, necessarily – I largely put it out of my head – but it wasn’t something I had any desire to do either. But over the past few weeks I’ve started to get the itch to come back here. And yesterday morning I announced to Q, “I think I’m ready to start blogging again.”
So much has happened over the last four months, aside from the obvious, and I feel ready to share it and even celebrate some of life’s small stuff again. As hard as it is to think that two of our most important readers are no longer here to read these entries, I suspect it may feel good to share things in the moment. (Writing has always been therapeutic for me. The only way I got through the plane ride to Madison in April, for example, was by cracking open my laptop and typing what would eventually become the eulogy.) I also know it will feel good to someday look back and read what we were up to – to see how life inched back to “normal,” or, at least, the new version of it, and how we started feeling strong and even (dare I say it?) happy again.
I have a lot to catch you up on, and I’ll start soon.
-M