GRIEF WIPES OUT INDEPENDENCE

Grief is a gray cloud that swirls around your ankles. Then it slips insidiously up past your knees to hover around your hips...then, before you know it, it's choking you. You try to breathe but the thickness of that cold gray cloud clogs up your nostrils, your lungs and finds its way down inside to your heart. There it just seems to solidify and take up residence. Damn it. 

Grief really did a number on my independence. I am so resentful of that fact! I think what really hits all of us so hard is that when our loved one dies, and inevitably we realize why we are missing them so much, part of the loss is their specialty. We miss their specialty. My husband had many specialties but one of them was technology. 

Rob could write code, decipher Linux, and he hated Microsoft products; nevertheless, whenever I had a problem with any hardware or software, he was my problem-solver. Quite often he would impart some nugget of brilliance and I would be able to finish the job. (He was a natural-born teacher that way.) I felt my confidence blossom and I used to think I was really good with computers. I used to think that everything computer related was easy-peasy. 

Since Robert passed away, I have spent big bucks on computer repairs, getting rid of mammoth viruses, trying to overcome problems with my laser printer. Oh, I could go on but you get it. Strangely, it turns out that all those repairs are not really so easy-peasy after all. Who knew? While Rob was alive, I just took it for granted that any technological problem I had, he would solve. 

I've seen him take up to four days to solve some programming dilemma in Linux. Believe me, life wasn't peachy during those hours. He was frustrated and that filled me with dread. Meal times were uncertain when Bob was working on a computer breakdown. Sometimes he would arise in the middle of the night because he had been thinking of how to solve a particular problem and the answer would suddenly appear in his brain at 2 AM. I'm the type of person who can go right back to sleep so it never bothered me. I was just in awe of that kind of thought process. 

Bob was a "big picture" thinker. He could always see the end result, the bigger picture. He would think around problems but he really wasn't that good at explaining the details. He liked to jump from point A to point Z in one fell swoop and he couldn't understand when normal people just couldn't 'get it'. Take me, for example. I am a details person. The end result might be a bit hazy for me, but I can explain and execute steps 1, 2 and 3 in order to build a great foundation. And then work onwards from there. Each step would be detailed. But not for Rob. Sometimes that caused problems in our relationship but not very often. Mostly he was just so easy to live with. Nothing bothered him and he was always ready to live and let live. 

So he lived. Died. And let me live...with my many computer problems and now I just wish that I had learned more or learned better from his example. I know that grief has whacked out a bunch of my previous "get up and go" and replaced it with "life is too short to worry about this: pay someone to fix it". Maybe that's okay? Maybe that is just a stage in further development. Yeah, that's it. A stage in further development. I think that some lesser-known aspects of continuing life while grieving include a weariness that I, for one, never payed much attention to before now. When I think of trying to learn all about fixing computers (it used to be VERY interesting and exciting for me) I am just tired. Too tired to bother. I'd rather go out for a walk or for a ride. Or perhaps I'd rather cook a vegan meal. I've gone from explorer to employer!

It's the cycle of life.