“I'm OK. Ups and downs” (a look at month 3)

My standard response when anyone asks me how I am is, “I'm OK. Ups and downs.” And it's always the truth. I'm not wallowing in the pit of despair; I'm not having celebratory parties. I'm OK. And this month, every time I had an up or a down, I wrote it down on a notepad, and I realized that would be the perfect content for this blog post! So without further ado, my list of the ups and downs I've experienced in the third month after the love of my life passed away.

Ups:

• I'm a huge sunroof fan. I just like to have that extra light in the car when I'm driving around. But when there are two people in the car, you can almost never use the sunroof because the sun almost always hits one person, so I never really got to use it when Vic was in the car, which was most of the time. I also like opening the sunroof when I'm driving around in the evenings. I love the rush of fresh air. He did not, because in his later years, he was always cold. But now, I use the sunroof all the time.
• Crochet date night. Last month, one of my crochet buddies read my blog post lamenting the loss of date night and asked if I wanted to have a crochet date night. (She was also the foster coordinator at the Longmont Humane Society who was responsible for getting us to foster Bella, so she's really the gift that keeps on giving.) Naturally, I said yes, and the next thing I know, she's inviting another one of our crochet buddies, and I'm inviting my crochet buddy, and now crochet date night is a thing. It gives me something to shift my focus when I realize it's Friday night and I'm not with my date.
• I changed my password at work last week. I had a password change come due shortly after Vic passed away, and I decided I was going to do a year of Vic-related passwords. This is my second one, and it incorporates his profile name on one of our streaming sites: Thag. This is an up because it always makes me laugh when I type that part of my password, which I do at least a dozen times every day.
• Another thing I did last week was have an early breakfast with a dear friend from my early days at Leopard, when I idolized her (as I still do). This alone is an up, but there's more.
• As I pulled out of the garage and drove down the street, I noticed that many of the cars had frost on them. We lived in a townhouse for 14 years that didn't have a garage, and for at least seven of those years, I drove to work. Did I ever have to scrape the frost of my car? I did not. Vic always scraped my car off for me. One of the things I am fond of saying at bridal showers is, “A wedding is a day. A marriage is every day.” I have said this countless times over the years, but Vic always showed up for me.
• As I drove down to Lafayette, the sun was rising. And it's fall, so the leaves are changing. And the Earth is in just the right place that the sunrise is particularly spectacular. These are all things that I wouldn't have noticed if I hadn't married Vic.
• I just realized last week that I don't have to wear headphones when I'm on a work call. #FreedomFromTheCord
  
• Showers are boring, and although I have a boatload of music and a bazillion portable devices, you can't just put an one in the bathroom. You can't even hear one of the original iPods without a sound dock (yes, I still have an original iPod—do you want to make something of it?), and the volume doesn't go high enough on a newer iPod or an iPhone to hear it over the running of the water. I do have a sound dock, but I use it at my desk to keep my (very old) iPod charged (it no longer holds a charge at all, but as long as it's hooked up to the sound dock, it always has power). Vic had two sound docks—but they were his, and he used them where they were. I certainly didn't want to be moving any of our sound docks back and forth to the bathroom every day. Not to mention that Vic was usually asleep when I was taking my shower, and I didn't want to wake him with blaring music that he probably wouldn't have even liked. Vic offered to buy me a waterproof Bluetooth speaker for my birthday one year, but then I would have had to to take my phone in to the bathroom, and the Bluetooth drains the battery, and that's not the device where I keep all my music, and none of my other devices had Bluetooth, blah blah blah. But last week I was in the shower and it occurred to me that ... uh ... Vic was no longer using his sound docks. So on Monday, I pulled one of his sound docks into the bathroom, hooked up his (very old) iPod Touch and started playing an album, which was the Statler Brothers, whom I love. It may have been my best home shower ever. Now I just have to make a shower playlist in iTunes.
• The World Series started yesterday, and I don't have to watch it. Vic loved baseball, and although he didn't follow it religiously (he only cared about how the Rockies were doing), he did tend to tune in to the end-of-season games. I don't love baseball, and my shows piled up on the DVR during the playoffs and the series. (That said, I did get a lot of crafting done during those games. When I'm watching a movie or a show, I often have to look up to see what is going on, and if it's really good, I stop stitching/crocheting for a few minutes. If I cry—and let's face it, this is why I watch the shows I watch: for a good cry—I have to stop for even longer. But during a baseball game, I never have to look up once! So this could just as easily gone in the "Downs" list.)

Downs:

• I received a branded apron from my company recently. I had participated in a months-long event called 100% You, which gave us access to four amazing woman who coached us on money, movement, meals and mindfulness, and the apron was a gift from the “meals” segment. I wanted to take a picture of myself in the apron, and a selfie just wasn't going to cut it. Obviously, Vic was always my go-to guy for taking pictures of me, whether I was showing off a crochet project I just finished, modeling something someone else gave me, or just wanting to put something special on Facebook. The realization that he would never again take a picture of me was a real blow.
• Side note: There was a time when I got tired of Vic taking pictures of me—specifically on vacations—and we could both point to the exact picture when it happened. He did not like that at all—he took it as criticism—and he didn't take a picture of me for two years after that. We laughed about it in our later years, but there was always a tinge of anger in his laugh.🤣
• Similarly, I miss the person I could really celebrate my wins with. The person who didn't think I was bragging about how many blue ribbons I won at the fair (not gonna lie—it was a lot 🤣), or something good happened at work, or someone on the street complimented a hat I made.
• Recently, the TV show Eli Roth's History of Horror showed up on the DVR. We watched the first two seasons when they came out—Vic was a huge fan of old horror movies 🧛‍♀️ (and some new ones), and that is something I shared with my dad (we called them Patty Daddy movies)—and the third season started recently. I'll watch it in his memory, but I'll be sad.
• I have had some lower back pain for a long while, and I have tried a number of treatments. Now I'm going to get a treatment that requires anesthesia, and you know what that means: I need a ride. I am fortunate that my sister is retired, so she is able to take me to this appointment, but she lives in Littleton. This is going to be an all-day thing for her, instead of the two-hour thing it would have been for Vic.
• The watermelons in the garden mocked my grief. They kept growing even though the person who really wanted them was no longer here. A-holes.
• Halloween. It was not his favorite holiday (that was Thanksgiving), but our neighborhood is particularly festive come Halloween. Last year was subdued. I don't know if you are aware, but there was a pandemic. But one day, on my Bella walk, I noticed that the one house that would be Clark Griswold's main competition in a Halloween Vacation movie was starting to set up again. He loved that house.
• Just realizing how many things Vic did—even in the later years when he was really going downhill—that I took for granted. I often thanked him for doing things that were his “job” (just because it's his chore doesn't mean I can't be grateful), but I don't think I had any idea how many things he actually did around the house until I had to start doing them myself. I hope he didn't feel like I took him for granted.
  
• Side note: I find it exceedingly ironic that both “uphill” and “downhill” have a negative connotation. This was something I discovered when I was trying to equate “ups and downs” with a roller coaster ride.
  
• Facebook served me up with the following memory—an old post of mine—a week ago: “You gotta love a guy who goes to the store at 8 o'clock at night—alone and unrequested—to get you exactly the cough syrup you want. I'm not saying that Vic did that, because he doesn't like it when I brag about him on Facebook, I'm just saying that I could be married to a guy like that for, oh, 26 years, 2 months and 5 days. Maybe longer.” Yes indeed. I could be married to a guy like that for 32 years, 11 months and 14 days.
• Similar to that TV program showing up on the DVR, I got milk from Safeway the other day, and although we're not even past Halloween yet, it's Christmas at Safeway: eggnog in the house! Eggnog. One of Vic's favorite drinks, and Safeway eggnog was his favorite. He was a huge eggnog fan because (a) he liked the way it tasted, (b) it packed a lot of calories and (c) it shut me up when I was complaining that he wasn't eating enough. We kept Safeway eggnog in business for a decade. The saddest thing about seeing the eggnog was remembering that last year, he wasn't as fond of it, and it was just a reminder that although he died in July, the process started much earlier than that.
• And similar to that, I got an email from McDonald's last week. The McRib is back. Vic. Loved. The McRib.
  

The interesting thing is, when I have an “up” moment, it is usually followed by sadness, and when I have a “down” moment, it is usually followed by a smile. In a weird way, the up moments seem to reinforce the fact that he's gone, but down moments remind me how lucky I was to have Vic as my husband, my best friend, my true partner in life. Grief is funny that way.

Last week was the worst. No ups, all downs. Two incidents that caused me to break down in sobs, and one that I would have had my friend Linda not been here with me—with her here, I was able to laugh off my pain. I had no focus last week. No energy. And this was with the mindfulness exercises I was doing and crochet date night! But I'm just chalking it up to the fact that the three-month mark was approaching, and I'm expecting the sadness to ebb when today passes, just as it did after the two-month mark.

As usual, I'll leave you with some pictures. These highlight the ups and downs of this month.

Fall trees in the neighborhood

The first picture of me not taken by Vic

The moment when I said, “Can you please stop taking pictures of me?”
And then he did. For two years.

 

 

 

Watermelon salad made with
one of Vic's watermelons

And, yes, I'm going to post 13 pictures of Vic's favorite Halloween house. Enjoy!

This is the left side of the house—or in pirate parlance, the port side.

This is the full front yard—and it changes every year.

I made this one extra large so you could see their wicked sense of humor—
that is supposed to be a trick-or-treater in there.

This is what you see as you head up to the door.

And this is how beautiful it looks at night.

If you made it this far, as always, I thank you all for your support. It really helps to have a village. ❤️