For about a month now, I have been making a plan. That plan was to clean-out and clean-up my guest room. Well, I loosely call it a guestroom, more like the, I am not ready to deal with this so I throw it in this room, guestroom. Last year or so, I did a post about two rooms in my home that needed work. My office and my “guestroom”. The office got an overhaul but all that stuff I wasn’t sure of, it went into the “guestroom”. Same for those things in my bedroom that I wasn’t really ready to get rid of, but was testing myself to see if I could live with out, went into that room too.

I woke up this morning, with the plan to spend 1 hour. That’s it. Enough time to get started but not enough to get me tied up in that room all day. It took 15 minutes. 15 minutes to totally shit can my plans. I quickly got rid of unused supplements that Tom purchased and thought I would start in the closest. BAM!!!! I was met with a blue box. Newspapers from when the first Gulf War started and love letters. Love letters from Tom from Basic Training and love letters from his time in the desert. How quickly I went from standing tall (figure of speech) and strong (I think I can, I think I can) to laying on my bed unable to stop the freight train of memories that had left the station and was picking up speed fast! Oh and did I mention, I had to move a bag of his very, inappropriate t-shirts he wore after the ALS diagnosis? Give you one guess what I did with the t-shirt I grabbed from the bag…come on, what did I do? If you are a widow and your first thought was, “I bet she smelled it”, you would be correct!!!

That’s how my day has gone. Started off great and now, I am sitting here, telling you how hard some days can get. I try to wake up every day and every night before I go to bed, and say out loud what I am grateful for. It begins and ends with my family. I try to live my life in a “glass half full” kind of way. To find the lesson in the hard times, to see that the sun does come up after the darkness. I forget that sometimes, I must still struggle to get through the dark but deep down, I do know, I will find my way to the light again.

There is no quick fix for this unfortunately. It is not something someone can take away or do something to make better. This is grief. This is a process and sometimes you can get derailed. I could try to self analyze what is going on, It’s the room, it’s the letters, it’s all the things that have happened this month, like a few trips where I was able to support my ALS and disabled veteran community. I was sick with the flu or maybe the AC unit that took a crap or a wind and hailstorm we had two nights ago that has left me vulnerable, scared, tired and feeling alone. I have found on this side of the ALS journey, I don’t like asking for help, and when I do, it is me really stepping out of my comfort zone. I think I should be able to handle what comes my way. The reality is, I can’t sometimes. Tom and I were a team for 33 years. Even towards the end, I could look to him for guidance, now I am on my own. I do have a few close people in my life I rely on, but at the end of the day, this is my journey and I have to figure out how to navigate it. That’s why I make plans. Unfortunately, “the best-laid plan of mice and men often go awry.”

So how do I come out of this? Well, I will probably continue to read some of these love letters to remember and remind myself of the life I had with Tom. I will allow myself to feel the feels and will probably go to bed early. In the morning, I will box the letters up and place them on the shelf in my closet and spend an hour in the “guestroom” hoping not to get derailed again.

All my love,

Lara