July 2019 Vacation, Vancouver Island
Mostly, I just feel joy being here. Like being here on the Island is giving me a taste of how I will live out the rest of my days and maybe even find some peace and calm on this second half of my journey. I remember reading one of those posts about grieving and it stuck…There are only two times, the time befoer you died and the time since. There is only “life before” and “life after”.
I’m trying to focus on the fact that I have a loving husband who dearly wants a long and happy retirement with me. We both are making plans to move forward.
We are on day 7 here at the off-grid cabin, and some dead trees were taken down and cut to length for firewood but needed to be split. There is an electric log splitter that , when attached to the generator makes this job easy. As I was running the splitter I was overcome with emotion and was sobbing uncontrollably because I was remembering the Christmas that Colton had purchased this for us. This huge box was under the tree and he was very proud of it. Randy and I were stunned to see what it was, and touched that he would think of this. He said “this is to make it easier to be at the cabin when you’re old and can’t split wood anymore”. We laughed at the time and thanked him for thinking of us, but seeing how he was thinking ahead for us was definitely an emotional trigger for me, and out came the grief in a waterfall of tears. He was never able to come out to the cabin and see this beautiful place yet I know he was right beside me, seeing how easy it was to split all that wood.
Here, without the distractions of cell phones, internet and the demands of regular life, I can think. I can clear my mind. Sometimes that lack of distraction results in hardcore grieving, but it seems to be the good, cleansing kind. Usually I can think and remember and be ok with whatever I remember sometimes with tears of gratitude and sometimes with no tears for a change.
Sitting around the campfire at night with my husband, his two sisters and their husbands and having a few drinks I often feel a tiny bit stronger. Like maybe I can find a group here that will help me navigate my way through this. The good, creative, happy days and the days that are dark and heavy and oh so very hard to carry.