Susan is well aware she lied in her last post when she said she'd see you tomorrow. Not only did she not see you tomorrow, she abandoned her voluntary commitment to write a BLAHg post every day then she took the month off.

During this time period Susan got different health insurance, celebrated Thanksgiving with all her cousins, watched a bunch of episodes of Cops, fell in love with a red vintage ice bucket, cleaned her house for a party, spent money on car repairs and plane tickets, observed a fella with a sack lunch walking along the side of the road accompanied by a swan, and decorated for Christmas by plugging in her Little Light Up Santa.

As if all that weren't enough, she commemorated her beloved Cousin Lisa's second birthday without her, followed the next day by the husband's second anniversary in Heaven, or wherever he actually is.

Susan caught herself referring to something that occurred around the time the husband died as having happened last year. That sh*t was two years ago, not one. Two years.

Yesterday Susan saw someone with her husband's hair; thick, blinding white, combed straight back covering a square head. She always thought the husband's head was shaped like a Rock-Em Sock-Em robot. This dude didn't look like the husband, only his hair did, and she watched him until he disappeared from her view. She lapped up that few seconds of a long gone familiarity like a dog lapping water from a pothole.

A few days earlier the song that played over Susan's clock radio came on (click HERE for a reminder) and she immediately started crying. Her brain recognized that song in like two notes and the response was involuntary.

Psychic pain travels faster than physical pain as evidenced by the the immediacy of Susan's grief versus the time it takes for her to start punching holes in walls after she slices a finger fighting with a can of black beans.

Ed note: There were no quality controls for this research.

Anyway, that's what Susan's been up to.

Susan was in the process of stripping the linens off her bed to be washed, as she went along she was thinking of the husband. Once the bed was bare she felt something scrape across her leg to which she immediately thought how the husband would reach out and grab her as she passed by. Twenty five years living together did nothing to diminish his enthusiasm for a quick feel. She looked down to see the Do Not Remove Under Penalty of Law tag and laughed to herself thinking the husband was using it to get her attention. She stopped what she was doing and stood there, letting him make her smile, until her reality flipped and she covered her face with her hands & started to cry.

Susan has been concerned with her stupid memory lately, it's not uncommon to lose her train of thought, forget that she just pulled a can of black beans off the shelf two seconds earlier, not recognize new people the second time she sees them, and misplace common vocabulary words. Luckily she can still rewind a bit to pick up where she left off, eventually remember the new people and sometimes even figure out which word she was fishing for.

Susan conducted some casual research and took this test from the Alzheimer's Association website to determine if her symptoms were normal, and she's happy to report that they are.

Thus far.

If the day comes when she forgets what to do with her knife and fork, then she's got a problem larger than being unable to cut a big piece of food into smaller pieces.

Susan mentioned this to her daughter, who offered the suggestion that it's probably no coincidence that her memory problems ramped up after... not saying the words 'after daddy died' just saying 'after....' and allowing the silence to finish her thought.

Susan had previously come to that conclusion on her own but she still enjoys getting paranoid about everything.

Moments later, Susan picked up her phone from the kitchen counter when she inadvertently hit the New York Times app and this front page article came up on her screen:

Fraying At The Seams

Like all New York Times articles it went on forever, but she kept reading, and thought that she would save it to encourage her when she gets Alzheimer's. As she read, she thought about a promise the husband repeated throughout their marriage 'I'll stay with you till you don't recognize me.' usually followed by a kiss or a grab or just a smile. To her, it meant exactly the opposite, and was a playful affirmation of his commitment.

She imagined the husband's happy voice and saw his lovely face in her memory, then began to cry. It was a good cry with flowing streaks of tears and a low rumble of sustained misery. If the kids weren't in the house she would have opted to howl, but that was not a direction she could take right then. Plus, she had things to do and needed to get moving.

The crying continued for like an hour; down the hall, in her room, on the toilet and then in the shower. After she finally knocked it off she looked like sh*t, an appearance always tries to avoid. Susan did her best to arrange the way she looked & headed out the door to enjoy her weekend.

Driving to work, Susan saw someone who resembled her husband. The closer she got the less he looked like her husband but it was too late, the seed was planted. She let go of all mental controls and allowed herself to remember, if only for an instant, what it was like to see the husband walking the earth again. She let her brain carry her back to that simple, ordinary, wonderful impossibility.

Susan is aware in her every conscious moment that the husband is gone. Even when she's engaged in things that have her total attention, she's aware. Even when she's reading or laughing or cursing a four minute traffic light with no turn arrow, she's aware.

The husband has been absent from her life for 488 days. That doesn't even seem so long, right? How about a year, four months and three days? Seventy weeks?
She accepts her current state without complaint although sometimes she likes to remind people Hey, I have a dead husband over here. She almost always regrets doing so, but it's a testament that she can't always keep everything held together.

There's a freedom to having a dead husband, Susan can do what she wants with only her children to consider, and they don't require much onsite interaction any more. She is available to accept any invitation offered no matter how drop of the hat it may be. She also observes the freedom to stay in all weekend, not answer the phone and not shower.

There's nothing worse than an old whiny bore, so Susan's gonna stop right here lest she turns into one. Check back tomorrow and she'll report on how the ants are back in her kitchen.

who foresaw that I
would prove my strength by living
this year without you

I fill the absence
with a thousand reflections,
each a universe

red bird on a branch -
I remember that morning
and our happy chat

in similar moments
maybe I'll choose to see you
blowing me a kiss

Even though Susan just concluded the entirety of 2015 in the grip of double barrel grieving she's not going to say she had a bad year. What she had was a special year in which she was given the best from all the best people around her. Many were lifers, some were far away or brand new, but her legions of supporters all contributed significantly to Susan's successful first year.

She was afraid to let it go because she knew it would take her farther away from the husband. She felt comfort for those 365 days being able to think on this day last year we were happy...However, it was ultimately nothing she could hang her hat on. When that personal day of infamy came it was OK, fun even, filled with his meatballs & sauce and people to help eat them.

Susan will admit that she's been a real prizewinning m*therf*cking heavyweight champ about everything. Her mental fortitude keeps her moving forward, but her people keep her happy. A component of this has been a new job, one which she didn't even have to look for, she just had to say thank you then unwrap it.

In the interest of full disclosure, not everything has been all top form behavior during her year of grief. One particularly immature habit has been Unnecessary Procrastination Resulting In Unnecessary Consequences.

Self explanatory.

She gets exhausted quite easily so there has been a noticeable decrease in the amount of cooking and cleaning being done around the house. Plus she's more forgetful than normal, wasting time searching for cans of corn, her phone or the last thing she set down on her desk.

However, there are perks to Susan's enforced single status, such as double the closet space & the ability to make plans on a whim. If she feels like spending the entire weekend in bed watching Netflix, she happily does so. Who wouldn't love all that, right?

However, there are no perks whatsoever to losing her beloved Cousin Lisa. No perks at all.

Susan feels as though the husband lobs messages to her from wherever he is, most notably this one, but there have been others, one causing her to say hello out loud to him in the middle of her work day.  She likes that.

This past week Susan told her kids about a feeling she had, kind of like she was being nudged from beyond. It was nothing more than taking notice of two related things she overheard. The mere fact that she paid attention to it made her think it might be something more.

Stay tuned.

Susan has dragged herself across the finish line to Day 30.

She hopes that everyone appreciates how difficult it was to stretch what was maybe five days' worth of material into thirty. What a testament to her awesome blogging talents!

December First and Second are Susan's ground zero. She's got a plan to get through each day and they both start with getting up & going to work. Her Acme Heaven Sent family is pretty good at caring about Susan and who wouldn't want to get a little bit of that on a difficult day? Or two.

Don't worry if Susan observes a few days of radio silence, she'll be fine, and you can believe her when she tells you that.

That wasn't Susan's husband yesterday, she's got more than one dead guy making her sad. That was Jeff, her daughter's former figure drawing teacher, although this description of the relationship is very inadequate. Suffice it to say that Jeff was important to Susan's family and also had the distinction of having the best, most entertaining wake.

Seriously.

Susan's husband died two weeks after Jeff, so she still has that jubilee looming on the horizon, but first she'll have to endure Cousin Lisa's birthday, the day before. Susan made it through 54 years intact, there were losses, but they belonged to other folks. This double whammy is hers.

Anway, Susan's gonna give you all a break tomorrow & BLAHg about normal stuff.

Earlier last week Susan, her two kids, little sister & brother in law attended a memorial put together by the hospice located on the grounds of The Little Caring Hospital for all of the families whose loved ones had passed through that way.

Wow, that was a long sentence.

Anyway, Susan regularly receives their invitations to bereavement support services and events but this is the first time she has taken them up on anything. The memorial was to be held in the hospital's chapel and she was particularly attracted to the option of being able to share 'memories, a poem or a prayer' meaning she would have a captive audience and a microphone.

Susan thought she might like to read the poem her pal Mikel had sent her, one which helped in the early days, and something she still re-reads. There were one or two points within the poem that she didn't specifically agree with, like 'loving being a matter of eternity more than of time', but the rest of it was pretty on target. Susan's big with sharing things that help her ease the burdens of life, whether inspiring others to see the up-side of grief or to wage a deadly battle against ants in the kitchen with a DIY killer (Borax + honey).

The more she thought about it the more Susan realized that she preferred to use the opportunity to tell people about the husband. This was not going to be an improv situation, she would write everything down. She searched her little toy brain for a good story but came up empty. Her brain has not been particularly strong this last year, which she worries may be the coincidentally timed emergence of dementia, but she set aside that possibility and consulted her alter-memory, the archives of Twisted Susan. Very quickly she found this post then adapted it to her current need.

On the way there Susan was looking forward to being back where the husband was so well cared for, but the daughter was not happy as they walked past the hospice where her father died. She removed her mother's arm from around her shoulder and growled like a little broken hearted cub. Once inside she perked up when she saw her aunt & uncle.

Mercifully it was an Inter-Denominational Celebration of Life and not a Catholic service. The program began with a welcoming blessing & candle lighting then a musical interlude by the most adorable acapella chorus of white haired men ever to belt out a churchy song. After this was the celebration of life part where each person who requested to speak was called up to the altar.
The participants were all sad, a few cried, some went against Susan's personal code by winging it, best was the young girl who read a poem about her grandmother. After taking a long walk up the center aisle with all eyes upon her, she stared straight ahead and very clearly read her poem in front of what were probably 200 people, then took that same brave walk all the way back to her seat. She did a nice job.

Shortly thereafter Susan's name was called.

Sidebar: Susan's son, who was arriving separately, was still not there. (Insert angry mommy Grrrr sound). There will undoubtedly be a meeting with him on this topic later.

Susan and her prepared statement took their place at the front of the room. She looked briefly at the group, announced that she was nervous then in a slightly breaking voice said she's been without her husband for 323 days, that's 44 weeks, and would like to read them a list of things that she liked about him:

• He was impressive with a yo-yo
• Describing the birth of his son he said 'I never knew how exhausting it was to yell at someone for four hours'
• He sang, poorly
• He was very adept at winning arguments, but took it easy on Susan
• He ran around in the yard with the kids and the dog
• He could always be counted on to complete any disagreeable task
• He told funny stories from his youth about drunkenness & neighborhood brawling
• He apologized by saying 'I've decided to forgive you'
• He didn't build himself up by making others feel small
• If he didn't know something, he knew a guy who knew 
• He said that being mad at Susan was like being mad at a puppy (got a big Awwww from the crowd)
• He didn't worry about things he couldn't control
• He did the Lindy at weddings & grabbed anyone in his path
• Before he was married to Susan he raised two smart, independent, caring & wonderful girls that have always been terrific big sisters to their two kids
• He would say 'It's better to seek forgiveness than permission'
• 'Thanksgiving is not a low-fat holiday'
• When arguing he'd say 'Don't cloud the issue with facts'
• About making decisions; 'The situation is the boss'
• Upon doing something for him he'd say 'Who's better than you?'
• About money he said a few things; 'I can owe it to you or you can forget about it'                        Expenses related to mistakes were called the 'stupidity tax' and 'All financial crises only last for 48 hours'
• 'Success is 90% showing up, 9% listening & 1% dumb luck'
• 'Tough times don't last, tough people do'
• Lastly, his favorite was always; 'Analyze, Adapt, Overcome'

The crowd had been chuckling all along but Susan was surprised as hell when everyone applauded, little sister said it wasn't even she who started it. 

The husband could still make people laugh.

Susan's son showed up during the Reading of Names; each loved one's name was read as their family members walked up front to hang a sparkly cardboard dove on a tree. Some folks had two entire rows of people in attendance, others only one or two or three. This is where Susan got a good look at how bereaved people were. Many were grim faced. She felt particularly sad for the older folks, grief had really roughed them up. 

Let's fast forward to the balance of the night highlights:

Susan's daughter hung their sparkly dove on the highest branch, the old man acapella chorus came back to cheer everyone up, Susan & her family went out for BLTs and milk shakes.

Susan felt like a pathetic wretch of a widow today.

It started when she lost the annual competition she has with herself and turned on the heat. Shivering in her lonely bed all night weakened her resolve. She hit bottom five seconds into the new day and copped some warm thermometer action.

At work she was unfocused and tired, she kept her coat on most of the day, she forgot where she put things, she went downstairs to deliver an envelope then came back upstairs still holding it.

She's preoccupied by her son's collection of points on his recently established driver license & the impact on her insurance, by the letter he received about his college financial aid, and by his inclination to act like a nineteen year old jerk. The husband would have been a big help with the financial aid stuff because he was smart like that. Instead Susan is left to figure out how she's even old enough to have a nineteen year old jerk for a kid.

In the evening the seventeen year old daughter had a college fair to attend. She and Susan walked around not sure what to ask. Susan's brilliant solution was 'We're not sure what to ask, what can you tell us' and little by little they got the idea. It was nice to watch the daughter gain confidence with every conversation. Susan was happy about that but was still overwhelmingly sad because this situation was exactly what the husband was good at; talking to people, getting information and understanding the between the lines stuff.

The 45 minute financial aid workshop knocked Susan out, at the end Susan spoke to the instructor privately about her son's situation then couldn't wait to go home and cry.

She suspects that she may be over reacting so she's going to pull the plug on today, get a good night's sleep & hope that tomorrow will be better.

Ten Months

In the beginning Susan felt scared when she cried, she didn't know how deep the pit was. After a while she saw that she could withstand it, she could walk around in the middle of it and not be swallowed up.

Susan gets shanked by grief. It's always something simple, a song lyric, a line in a movie, a tiny unpredictable thing that triggers a very acute, stabbing memory. She never knows when it will happen. Everything could be going along great, then it flips, and the full understanding of her loss hits her in the heart.

The husband showed her that it was possible for someone to see her at her worst, at her most criminally insane and still love her. Year after year.

Susan doesn't shy away from the hurt, and yet she still doesn't think that she hurts enough.

Susan and the husband would have been married twenty one years today. Instead, Susan has been without him for 291 days.

Wasn't it just recently she was worried about having enough money to pay for the wedding? She remembers very clearly a conversation she had with him on this topic in which he assured her that they would. They picked a nice place and then did away everything extraneous after the food & a full bar. Susan's dress was hand made by her seamstress-landlady. She went to the local florist & said 'I'm getting married tomorrow, what can you do for a bouquet?'  Susan potted winter pansies for the centerpieces and chose an assortment of handmade chocolates as her favors. Tony Bennett, Frank Sinatra & Etta James all sang through little sister's CD changer. Everyone invited showed up.

They were married for twenty years and 76 days.

Susan is going to commemorate her first solitary anniversary with a tattoo in the husband's handwriting. She's not a tattoo person & he had terrible handwriting, so it's a big deal for her. She's hoping she won't pass out in the chair or anything.

*Ed. Note: If you are interested in travelling back in time to read what Susan wrote about her formerly alive husband on their anniversary, just click on that little purple Anniversary below.

A year ago Susan would find the Sunday papers waiting for her on the dining room table, maybe with a bag of bagels sitting on top of them. The husband was always up & out early then come home with the papers; the highbrow NY Times & lowbrow Post. It was a simple detail of her life that made her happy.

She could never get far before the husband interrupted her with conversation. She'd put her finger on the last word she read, stare at him until he stopped talking, then go back to reading. Every Sunday for 20 years.

Susan's 21st anniversary is this week.

The husband's giant cutting board sits on a shelf in the kitchen. It got used every night. He'd grill a steak or pork chops or chicken, then slice and serve it from the cutting board. Every night.

What does she do without all the little things that used to be her life? Some get filled with other stuff but mostly an absence exists.  Thinking about it makes her cry, which uses up some time. She never stops her tears except for necessity or if it's like enough already.

The other day she found a collection of things she wrote to the husband long ago; poems, little notes, pictures she drew. She started reading but it was too much. She kept two and threw the rest out. They weren't for anyone else to see, just him.

Susan writes Twisted Susan for herself but invites all her bloggy pals to read along, she invites you all into her brain. That's a pretty intimate invitation.
100% guaranteed no bullsh*t.

If Susan was a downer today, too bad.

The other night Susan thought she saw Cousin Lisa.
It took about two seconds, if even that long, to realize it wasn't her. And then to remember why it wasn't her.

In those two seconds an entire universe of happiness was created.
Then it evaporated.
Susan wasn't even sad, she accepted the evaporation and went on with her evening without missing a beat. But for two seconds she was cartwheeling through a field of lavender, as she though she was about to encounter her favorite person.

Susan reflected on this for days; the split-second delight she felt when her brain allowed her to forget before it made her remember. How it didn't bother her then, but it bothers her now. How she doesn't even know if she's grieving effectively.

Susan had a good cry over all this sh*t.

Susan can't BLAHg late at night because there's little quality control after 1 am, plus she just has to rewrite everything the next day. Even when she's done a good job on her modest assemblage of paragraphs and sends them out into the world, she still sneaks back to edit.

Lately Susan's BLAHging talents have gotten a little stuck. When the self revelatory brilliance she's composing is still a muddle of crap after three weeks she just chucks it. Same with anything that may inspire even a single person to feel sorry for her. There's no reason for feel sorry for Susan except when she has to sit through Super Troopers on Family Movie Night.

Double grieving has taken the fear out of a few things. For example, at work our favorite claustrophobic has taken to hopping on the dreaded elevator just for the hell of it. Sometimes twice a day. She even crawled underneath the deck at home to retrieve some flattened milk containers which had flung themselves out of the recycling bin. This behavior is quite unusual for her.

Susan's almost at the six month mark.

In the early days of her grief she cycled through misery followed by recovery then normalcy.

Misery recovery normalcy misery recovery normalcy.

Once again she's back to being pretty stable although she cries every day. Quick bursts, multiple times, then she's done until the next time. Which could be two minutes later. Susan doesn't avoid her grief, she tells herself
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.
It's been working.

Susan has switched her clothing from the boots and sweaters of a seemingly endless ice age to the flats and skirts of a budding spring. A portion of her well worn closet ended up getting tossed into the donation bag, or directly into the garbage.

After work one day she walked around a local department store picking out some clothes. Susan went to the dressing room where she hung her selections on the hook and started getting undressed. First she removed her necklace; a long gold chain holding the husband's wedding band. She doesn't wear it all the time, only when she has the proper neckline, otherwise it sits in a small ceramic dish next to his picture on her dresser. Her little altar

Susan has looked tired since the husband died, plus the end of the day was not her most attractive hour. She tried everything on, then rejected it all. Enough with clothes, she would go look at jewelry.

Susan walked around and touched everything. She ultimately fell in love with a gigantic blue beaded monstrosity of a necklace. She took it off from around her neck and headed toward the cashier when she realized she was not wearing the husband's ring.

Gasp! She had left her precious relic in the dressing room!

She did not panic, but walked with singular focus toward that destination. En route she contemplated how she would react if it was not there. Would she just suck it up like an extreme grown-up or would she hate herself forever like the total asshole she was?

Mercifully, her question would not have to be answered that day.

Saturday morning and Susan started crying even before she had her coffee.

Her priorities are all messed up.

Since she's been in the habit of crying for the last four months she has developed an involuntary pattern of covering her eyes with her left hand as soon as she starts. It's immediate, the hand just jumps up there. She assumes it started for privacy then just developed into the thing she does. It's when she really breaks down, not just for a quick sniffly thing.

It's her move. 

The move is not done in front of anyone, she hates an audience when she cries. But, in the shower, staring out the back door, sitting at a red light...

Susan attempted to reenact the move for a pal at work & couldn't. She doesn't really know where her hand goes. 

The hand knows but Susan doesn't.

She finds this interesting.

Four months today, Susan has been without the husband.

Susan has reverted to thinking of herself as a normal person but she's really not. How can she be normal when there's a big hole in her universe where the husband used to be? She doesn't even know where he is other than in a cardboard container in her bedroom closet. She sat his talking George Bush doll up there to keep him company, she likes to see them together.

Susan watched the husband get sick and die in two months, shouldn't she be mad or something? Or be flinging herself around screaming and tearing her hair out? Wait, she already does that when she can't find the nail clippers.

She's recently gotten a handle on the crying. She still does it of course, but can go longer periods in between.

That first day back to work after burying Cousin Lisa Susan took crying breaks in the toilet. At the end of the day she barely cleared the front door before she broke down, then sat in her car sobbing. Every morning she cried all the way to work then sat in the parking lot, sucked up her tears & went inside.

The car is crying central, it's her little privacy bubble which inspires thought and emotion. Same thing with the shower.
Alone + thinking = Bam! She's crying.
Thinking about sex definitely makes her sad, all that trust and intimacy is just gone. Plus the husband was funny. He'd strut around the room all full of himself like a wrestler in the ring, grandstanding for his audience. Who else is going to act like that for Susan?

No one.

Susan is going to get up, go to work, pay the bills, count her blessings and keep moving toward the future.

She misses her cousin Lisa every day.

She misses the husband every minute.

Susan's Plan of Grief Recovery

Susan's beloved Cousin Lisa was buried with military honors three months to the day after the husband died. She imagines the husband was pleasantly surprised to see Cousin Lisa show up in whatever location they now find themselves. This gives Susan comfort although it doesn't keep her from covering her face and sobbing into her hands at the thought of it.

On that first sad day Cousin Greg told Susan We're in the same club now. Sure, the Heartbroken Persons Club of Misery and Sleeping Alone Forever.

It needed a dramatic title.

After that, Susan spent some time thinking about what she knew of navigating grief so that she may help her fellow club member. Any success she's had comes from believing that she will be OK. She started a list and wrote the word BELIEVE.

Next she thought about how she would seek comfort by climbing back into bed with her morning coffee then stay there till the afternoon. She wrote that down, COMFORT.

She didn't always cry although she wanted to. To remedy this she'd look at a picture of her warm, protective, funny, smart, wonderful husband's face and let his absence overwhelm her. Once it started she'd keep it going.
She wrote CRY.

Next came a long one; DON'T ALLOW THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THINGS TO GET OUT OF CONTROL. This is why she came home & immediately stripped the bed, began clearing out his bedroom drawers, then hit the closet.

As Susan began taking over household & financial tasks previously maintained by the husband a word kept sailing through her head; simple.
Keep everything simple. Make it easy.
She thought about this word often, it became like her mantra. She wrote INSPIRATION WORD.

CREATE NEW RITUALS. Thursday Movie Night was instituted by the college wrestler. Each week one member of Susan's little family gets to choose a movie and accompanying snacks. The movie is totally up to the discretion of the chooser and kept secret until time of viewing to cut down on complaining by the audience. There are no rules for Thursday Movie Night beyond mandatory attendance between the hours of 8-10 pm.

Susan moves in slow motion through her days. Work is exempt from this lethargy because it's work, and she has to get sh*t done. But, when she's home only one thing per day gets accomplished when formerly it might be seven or eight. And, she's completely absent minded.
Susan finished with TO DO LIST lest nothing at all get done.