Work Text:
In order to understand, you have to know the following things about me:
- I'm pretty much a hermit. I'm more socially awkward than Cas, . I like it that way. I prefer my own company, or the company of the very few people with whom I've grown comfortable.
- I'm worse with feelings than Dean. I survive through compartmentalization with a toss of denial.
- I'm a thinker and a planner. I like to know how things work and I need to understand the possible outcomes of a situation.
- I'm a control freak. Details are my life, and I need to be able to manage my life down to the minutiae.
- I'm anxious. Crowds don't make me nervous, I have panic attacks. Loud noises, same. Unexpected touches? Guaranteed to make me shut down.
- I manage my anxiety by planning and controlling the situations I'm in. I set rules, design roles, and prepare. If I know the parameters, I can look pretty damned normal. You might not even know I'm freaking the fuck out.
Given these things, it was pretty amazing that I found somebody who could love *me*. He was my opposite: chaotic and outgoing and spontaneous and tactile, but we worked somehow. We balanced each other out.
We were together for ten years, and married for seven. I won't lie. We fought, and yelled, and there was a lot of compromise. It was worth it because at the end of the day, there was this one person in the world who knew me, understood all of those things, and still thought I was worth the effort. Loved me because he saw me in a way that nobody else ever had: smart and funny and strong and caring and perfect for him.
Eighteen months ago, my husband was diagnosed with cancer. It's simple to say that cancer is a huge life changer. It tilted out world upside down. It was a pretty fast downward spiral at first, but it settled into a kind of terrible new normal by the end of about month six. We spent more than half of that time in the hospital, and the time at home was a mix of pain management and just trying to find a few minutes where we could just be us.
Suddenly, there was no planning. Everything changed from day to day. I never knew if it was going to be a good day (roughly translated to pain pretty well managed and he's pretty close to the guy I knew) or a bad day (the meds got overwhelming, even when they didn't work, so some days he was an outright asshole and I had a hard time recognizing him).
Suddenly, there are people everywhere. There's pretty much no privacy in a hospital, even in a private room. At home, there was always somebody around. I needed to sleep sometimes, and he wasn't in a position to be left alone at all. Nurses and relatives in a constant stream.
Everyone wants to know how you're doing. Strangers give hugs at random.
I'm not going to lie, I was a fucking wreck. My world was falling apart and there was never a minute for me to just process it.
So, I fell back on my standby. I boxed it up and tucked it away until I could take the time to work through it on my own. I literally thought, Sam survived the cage, and Dean made it through Hell, I can do this. And I KNOW that they're fictional characters, but it got me through.
He died on November 4th. I held his hand and told him I loved him over and over as he died, because I promised him that the last thing he heard would be me telling him how much I love him. I don't think I've ever done something harder in my life than that, and I don't know if I ever will.
The thing you might not know: It doesn't stop. There are about a thousand things to be dealt with when somebody dies. Disposition of the remains, funeral planning, insurance companies, a fucking mountain of hospital bills, joint property...the list is endless.
So, I've got this box in my head, the one that I've been stuffing all of the shit that I couldn't handle into for the last sixteen months, and it is packed full. The best comparison that I can come up with is filling a water balloon. Balloons are pretty flexible. They'll hold a lot more than you might think, but they'll eventually leak or pop.
I wish I could say that I took some time to unpack all of that, to process it like a healthy person, but I can't. It's not who I am. I don't have a framework for this. I don't have a set of guidelines to follow, and I don't understand what's normal. So, for the most part, I leave it there, and keep going.
The human brain is not designed for that.
I push myself out of bed every morning, and it is a colossal fucking effort. I go through my morning routine because routines are comfortable and familiar, and I can do that.
And sometimes, I break. It might be a song, not even a sad song, just a lyric that catches my attention, and shit leaks out of the box.
Sometimes, when I'm alone at night and our house is just so fucking empty and silent, shit leaks out of the box.
And I'm not a different person, I still don't know how to deal with it. I can't just shove it into the box, because that thing is broken at this point. So I'm balanced somewhere between angry at every fucking thing (Fuck you hospice program for sending me a condolence card) and sometimes taking a deep breath makes me cry like a baby. I had a fucking meltdown one morning because I was out of creamer and it was like slam the fridge, why the fuck wasn't that on the grocery list, oh yeah, because you haven't had creamer in your coffee for like a week, and you figured the powdered stuff would be fine if you decided you wanted some and shit, I hate powdered creamer, and I’m crying for two hours.
But I keep getting up. I keep going through the motions. I go to work and pay my bills and fucking smile and tell people that I’m making it. Because they ask, and fine is the biggest lie of my life, but how can I say I don’t know how to do this? I don’t even feel like a person? Fucking half of me is just gone how the fuck do you think I am? Don’t ask stupid questions.
So, I write. I write fluff, and happy, maybe a little bit of angst, but my characters are emotionally evolved enough to work that shit out.
And it helps. For a couple of hours a day, I can focus on the fact that life, in general, is not the terrible miserable thing that it has been. I can remember how it feels to be in love, and so in tune with someone. How it feels to share coffee. It’s like refocusing on the parts of us that were good, when what’s lingering at the surface is the agony of the last year. I can remember him smiling and laughing and healthy when the image of him fucking dying was all I could see for weeks after he was gone.
And I shared it. That’s something I always wanted to do, and Dan always told me I should, but I know my writing is trash. I’ve read millions of pages of other people’s work, and mine doesn’t stack up. But you did that thing that he always did: you read it, and you thought it was funny and cute, and worth something.
So I kept writing. Every day, even on the days where my fucking brain couldn’t decide if I was angry or sad or somehow really very much both.
And life got easier.
Finding something in my day that made me happy got easier too.
Telling people that I’m not fine, but I think I will be… that started to feel true.
So, thanks for that.