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Tomorrow I turn 37. It will be the first birthday in 10 years I will spend without Mike.
Obviously, I haven't blogged in months. I have much to say, but have no motivation to sit and write. I'm forcing myself to do some writing now.
I have wondered for a long time what I would title my next "meaningful" blog post. I had lots of titles in mind, but a few hours ago I settled on the current title, since no words can really explain where I'm at.
On Saturday it will be six months since I lost Mike. Six months. I almost choke on the words. I cannot even believe he isn't here with me, and won't be ever again. How does someone just cease to exist? I walk throughout our house, and just expect that he will be back. I look at his things, his clothing, his notebooks, his half-used cooking items in the kitchen. I look at myself. I say, "He would never just leave all his things. He would never leave me. Never."

Many people ask me how I'm doing. To be honest, I feel like shit. I always feel like shit. I just constantly have to come up with a new and less repetitive way to say it.
I feel as though I haven't spoken to or touched Mike in years, and yet the pain is as strong as the day he died. Most people have been very understanding, but a few have given me the old cliches:

-- "You're young."
-- "You have your whole life ahead of you."
-- "You might even meet someone else."
-- "Keep busy."
-- "It will get better in time."

Screw all of that. I hate my new life. I hate waking up each day without my husband, my lover, my best friend, my future. I wake up each day and immediately realize the awfulness of my reality and am instantly overcome with a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. Each time I wake up, I lose him all over again. I never go a day without crying. I take the edge off with a drink more than I should. I can't even sleep in our bed so the couch is now where I spend the night. I went back to work after the new year and lasted two and a half months. I couldn't focus, could barely get through the day and just flat out didn't care. From the moment I woke up, all I could think about was how many hours it would be until I could go home and lie on the couch and watch TV again. I started seeing a therapist once a week, joined a grief recovery group at my church, but at the end of the day nothing changes my reality. At 36 -- momentarily to be 37 -- I feel as though my life is over, and nobody can convince me otherwise.

I don't want to go back to October 14, 2011, but I will, eventually. I have to, for myself, go back and recapture what took place in Mike's final days. That will have to be in another post. For now, I will just unload what I've been feeling for the past six months. It will be random and stream-of-consciousness in nature.

Before (I use the term "before" a lot), even on my worst day of work –- or of life in general -– I still came home to Mike to relax, talk and just be with each other. Now, even on my “best” day, I come home to an empty house, to silence, to nobody to talk to, relax with, vent to or hold. I’d rather have everything else in my life be in disarray and still have him than to continue with what I have now.

I feel like a married woman trapped in a single woman’s life.

My everyday existence has become a painful inconvenience in my longing and search to be with Mike again.

Even though I have great faith in where Mike's soul is, I hate knowing he's somewhere I can't get to. I hate knowing he's in another realm, that he is "different" now and that the only way we'll be together again is for me to die. And even with that, I wonder what our love and relationship will be like then. I am obsessed with Heaven, and even its magnificence doesn't make me feel better. It's only a source of frustration.

I miss all the little things we'd do together, and that were unique to just us. How many husbands and wives grab their baseball gloves and a ball and go out into the yard to have a catch?

It’s not just missing him that I experience, it’s missing OUT on him.

It feels like I went from singles tennis to doubles tennis. I loved doubles tennis. Then my partner got snatched off the court, and I’m still forced to play in a doubles tennis match. I don’t want to go back to singles and everyone around me is playing doubles. I can’t handle what’s being thrown at me all by myself.

My future has been derailed. The path my life was on is forever changed, and there is nothing that can restore it.

Some people tell me to look to the Lord to heal my heart. Heal my heart? That’s an insult to my husband who plead for his life and for his own physical healing.

Don't get me started on faith. I am a Christian, but my anger at God is greater than ever. He let me down. He lied to us.

I’m used to being able to get through a trial and find a solution. This experience just feels like a record with a skip in it. There is no solution.

I feel like I was plucked up out of the life I loved and dropped down into someone else’s horrible life -- and I can’t find my way back no matter how hard I try.

Mike and I fought the fight together every step of the way, from the moment in his bedroom in 2003 when he said, “God, please don’t let this be cancer,” to the very last biopsy news we got. It only feels right that if we won, we won together, and if we lost, we lost together. But instead I’m here and he’s somewhere else. God should have taken us together.

I feel as though I'm done. I've lost. The game is over. I'm simply running down the clock of life.

I don't want to get used to him not being here. That just scares me‏.

For so long I was fighting for Mike, and for us/our life/our future. Now I’m just fighting for me and me alone. Without him, it just doesn’t feel like it’s worth the fight.

I feel like I'm in solitary confinement. That's how alone I feel without him.

I used to have hope. Even if it was slim hope, it was hope. The difference between one percent of hope and zero percent isn't a single percent -- it's miles apart.

My life has gone from HD color to grainy black and white. It's a real, tangible difference in my perception of life and I can't shake it.

This loss has left a huge gaping hole in me, and I feel like I'm slowly bleeding out. Cancer killed Mike's body. Now it's killing my soul.

Just like the book, "Where the Red Fern Grows," some days I feel like I could die of a broken heart. I understand now how that happens.

When people talk to me about starting a new life for myself, I think, "Out of what??" That's like expecting someone to build a house with wood and a hammer but no nails. I can't rebuild myself with an essential part missing.

I feel as though part of me has been amputated. It may not kill me, and outwardly I might heal, but I will never be whole again and have to learn an entirely new way to survive.

My future is not about finding my purpose in life, as some have put it; it's about coping with losing the purpose Mike had in my life -- the purpose he gave me.

Most days, I feel like a dead woman walking.

As a friend put it, Mike and I have a forever love, and realizing that is what will allow me to go on. For now though, I muddle through each day. The only thing that keeps me going is knowing how devastated my family would be if they lost me, too. I also know how much Mike wanted me to go on and be happy. But maybe he underestimated just how essential he was, and is, to my happiness. I pray he truly knew how much he completed me.