Three weeks.

Can it really only have been 3 weeks since I kissed her cool forehead goodbye?

In some ways it feels like a year.  I guess that's how grief goes.  I have felt a lifetime worth of emotions these last 3 weeks.  Cried more tears than I knew a body could produce.  I feel like I'm walking around with a gaping wound.  There is no healing.   If I get a few minutes reprieve it takes nothing to rip it raw again.  Driving past her nail salon.  Seeing her car still parked in my drive.  Yesterday morning I ran past her oncologist office where we sat and talked about the 6 months we had left with her (not quite, dear doctor, not quite) and I had to push myself not to stop right there and cry.

I open up TimeHop on my phone and see a post from 7 years ago when she drove from Ohio to watch our babies so we could go to a wedding.  I sign Jane Dare up for soccer and think how much she would have LOVED to be at those games.  I walk upstairs and it still smells like her.  I stuff her 3 favorite sleeping pillows under my bed because I can't fathom what else to do with them.  I've dealt with 99% of her possessions.  I did it quick, like ripping off a band-aid.  The man at Goodwill asking, kindly, if I was moving or just purging.  But the things that are left leave me undone.  Her basket of hair clips (she must have had hundreds), her favorite pictures, letters from her best friend written shortly before Christy died in 1969.

Jake comes to me tearfully, fearful for what 7th grade holds.  I don't know what to say.  I feel so depleted.  Nonny would know.  And she would be praying so hard.

My husband.  He misses his mother so deeply its painful to watch.  When we are all hurting so deeply its tempting to turn away.  But I force myself to stay.  He needs me, and I want it that way.

Being married to a psychologist I'm well aware that there is a process to grief.  Stages.  Funny how when you're in the middle of it those stages make no sense.  I can't see a beginning or end.  I can feel all 5 simultaneously.  Well, maybe 4.  Not the acceptance part.

My poor children.  They are dealing with the shell of a mother this summer.  I am short-tempered.  Emotional.  Sad.  They are so tired of seeing me cry.  I think they will be as relieved as I am on the first day of school.  

I'm often asked what we need.  Unfortunately, there is no easy answer.