Thread by @ThatShockratees

Don’t you love it when you’re wrestling with some thorny unsolvable threatening problem, then your alarm goes off, and you realize it was a dream and you really don’t have to solve it?

Of course, it also sucks when you don’t.

When G got her first MRI showing her just-diagnosed ovarian cancer all over her body, we went to records to get the report printed, then sat quietly looking down.

Then we both turned at the exact same moment: “We . . . We’re supposed to wake up now, right?” “Uh huh.”

We waited.

For nearly five years.

Only one of us woke up.

For a couple years after G died, I had dreams where she’d show up in my life. One time she was hurt and upset because I’d forgotten her at the hospital, and just left her there still alive.

In another one, she came home insisting openly she’d never died, and we had a full-fledged argument at the kitchen table, which culminated in my proposing that she go out to get the mail, and if she came back with it, I’d believe she was alive.

I woke up.

Another time, I was running after her through a decrepit basement with an underground swimming pool, insisting “But I’m dead too, I need to go with you, I just can’t stop walking for some reason!”

About 2 yrs after G died, I tried to “date.” If you’re going through this, after loss of a partner, my rather shitty take is 1) it sucks, 2) don’t try it. G and I were together 15 years. It was my only real relationship, and I’m too old to be intrigued by what I did before that.

All sex and all sex partners are pretty much the same, after a certain number. All relationships, though, are not. It was not a perfect relationship, by any means. But it was the only one either of us were capable of having. Or will ever be.

Next month, it’s 9 years from G’s death. If you’re going through loss of a loved one, my take is that it never goes away, but it changes. A part of you dies with them. A part of them lives in you. Honor your grief in all its forms. It will preserve you.