Life comes at you pretty quickly. I thought that I had mine figured out for the moment…I had the house I wanted to grow old in with the husband I wanted to grow old with and three amazing kids. I was getting up for a wine festival…my first thing to do kid free in years and I came downstairs to find my husband in full blown cardiac arrest on our deck.
And in that instance, I would never be the same again. We would never be the same again.
It’s been over six months since I lost the love of my life. And for the most part, life has found it’s calm again. My main focus has always been our home and our children. In that respect, I have existed almost in a bubble of their life and needs. It has only been recently that I have wanted to de-bubble somewhat.
Eating when you’re grieving I think it the strangest thing. I know that I have to because of my kids and because I am still breastfeeding our youngest, but since he died nothing tastes the same anymore. Nothing is the same. On the nights that it gets really bad I often will make just a side. I call it grief sides and it’s manageable to eat a bowl of stuffing or Texas toast on the super hard nights though even then not enjoyable as you would think.
Doing anything beyond what I had to do has been hard. I don’t read books or paint unless it’s related to getting the house in order. I find myself zoning out to energy healers on YouTube after my kids go to sleep until I finally fall asleep.
Because the anxiety of being a widow is something else. I worry about being the sole provider for my family. I worry about my kids now growing up in a single parent household. I worry about what is happening to my husband’s body. And then very recently, I started to think about what my life is going to start looking like moving forward.
Will I be alone for the rest of my life? Will I find love again? Will I get to have more children? Why did this happen to us? Why did this happen to me?
I was never lucky in the love department. I had two big loves in my life–one I left because I was so in love with him and it was clear he was just going to play games and then the other, died randomly on a bright fall morning taking our dogs outside. For years, I thought I went through all that came before my husband so that I could meet my husband…the night that I met him I came home, called my mom and told her I had met the man I was going to marry. That’s how *right* it all felt with him from the moment I met him.
And I guess the point was that we would come together, have a really good marriage and have three amazing kids…but I just thought we would also get to see our kids grow up together as we grew old, watching our bodies fall apart and laughing and dancing our way through it all.
I guess I just wonder what is next…will I raise my kids and travel the world looking at cool art and cultures by myself? Will I meet someone again?
I just don’t know, but I do know, I am having such an urge to find myself in all of this. I lost myself to marriage and motherhood for a long time and now I guess I have time to reflect on it all and am realizing that there is more out of life that I want and somehow I just have to find the courage and the energy to move passed the exhaustion of grief and being a single mom to find those pieces of myself again and nourish them.
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Katherine Kuzma-Beck 
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