Last month, I turned one.  

One year of being without my love, one year of being a mama, one year of grieving and wondering and crying and surrendering.  

One year of becoming.  Of being.  Of grasping and letting go and grasping again.  And of not knowing and sometimes not caring what tomorrow brings.  

One year of surviving.  Sometimes, gracefully.  Sometimes, fumbling madly in the dark. 

One year of holding onto the belief that the departure of the man I wished to spend the rest of my life with, was perfect in the eyes of the holy universe.  One year of cursing that belief, and of embracing it again.  

​It's been one year.  A whole year, and only a year.

Time is a tricky and illusory thing when you’re grieving.  It is painfully slow, and it is fearfully fast.  You want it to stop so you can catch your breath and get your bearings, and you want it to move so you can breeze past all the pain and sadness and anger, and wake up in a new life where everything is bright again.  And mostly, you want to go backwards.  You want to rewind to the time just before everything fell apart, that moment in which you maybe could have changed the way it all turned out.  Or you want to go back to that fine sunny day when you played hooky and spent the whole day in bed and snuggled with your love and cared nothing about the world outside, and you want to freeze that day in time.  

But you have to talk yourself off that ledge.  You could live the rest of your life in the past.  Replaying and re-examining how beautiful things were and how you could have made them better and all the things you wished you’d said a hundred times more than you said them.  If you believe that the life you thought you would have is the only life you were meant to have, then you will probably do this until the day you die.  

Don’t.  The life you thought you would have, you had.  It was perfect, and it was beautiful, and it was everything you wanted forever.  But forever is an illusion.  Nothing lasts forever, or even a fraction of that long.  Things last as long as they’re meant to last.  When they’re gone, they’re gone, and you bow to the ground and thank the stars for these incredible gifts, and you choose to continue your journey home.  That future did not belong to you.  And home is not always where we think it is.  

On July 22, 2015, I ended my year without George.  Nine days later, I celebrated our daughter’s first birthday.  For months leading up to that period I was consumed by sadness, anxiety, helplessness, and worry.  What would I do after the year passed?  Who would I become?  How was it that time kept moving forward when so much of my identity was steeped in the past?  

But after all the anticipation of those first anniversaries, I have found there is nothing to fear.  Instead of being forced to live further and further in the past, I have experienced an indelible shift in my being, my identity stripped once again -- first from wife to widow, and now from widow to warrior.  This new year, is a whole new year.  And thank goodness I don’t have to do that last year over again.  But look at what I am now, look at what I’ve journeyed through.  I’m starting to come out the other side.  I’ve been initiated.

Suddenly, with the passing of a year, I’ve been granted permission to experience life again.  I’ve begun attending social gatherings, chatting it up with strangers, saying “yes” to things that scare me, and opening the doors to my home and my heart.  It is frightening sometimes, opening to the world, my shiny new skin without armor or thickness, barely shed of those layers that once defined me as Me.  But as I emerge out of the widow womb and begin to interact with new people and experiences, I begin to discover myself again.  The intention behind that voice that was never quite as strong.  The vision through my heart that was never quite as clear.

There is an objectivity that comes from engaging with people outside of my emotional life, a reflection that is not based on a historical perspective of who I was, but one that is based on who I am, today.  These interactions are insightful and empowering, because as they experience me for the first time, I too experience me for the first time.  My identity as a woman, not as a widow, begins to take form.  Through this, I ask myself to remain vulnerable, to be naked, to allow this identity to be birthed in its raw natural state, without the mind interjecting its construct of what I should be, of what is right or wrong.  This is how I’m discovering who I am now, and I want to know the truth.  Thank you, humans everywhere, for helping me find it.  

​This is Life after George.  Joanne after George.  I am surprised to be here, and grateful, and excited, and humbled.  I bow to all the forces that have helped me along the way.  If you’re reading this, that’s you.  I love you.  Thank you.

July 22, 2015, 6:09 a.m.  
Wowza.
These were the last moments of George's life, exactly one year ago.  In less than 3 hours, he would collapse on 8th Street and never get back up.  His heart decided that day that it had given and opened and loved as much as it could in this lifetime, and it was time to move on.  But George continues to love, even if his heart is not beating.  His energetic heart is stronger and more present than ever, in his spirit and in the thoughts and actions of everyone who loved him.  

George had a lot of fans.  Everyone loved George.  There is a lot of love left in his legacy.

I have been fearing this day for a long time.  I have been pondering what to do, how to spend these "last moments", who to spend them with, where to go.  I am sitting at my kitchen table, our kitchen table; I am in my pajamas.  I am taking it minute by minute, as these things have gone since the moment I learned of his death.  There is no place to be.  There is nothing to do.  There is only me, and my thoughts, and my heart.  And my love for George.  I have everything I need wherever I am, whatever I do.  None of that decoration matters.

George died this day last year.  
​Around this time, he was sleeping.  Soon he would awaken and shower and put on his jeans, then his blue button down shirt, and look so handsome standing at the side of the bed.  Then he would tell me I was sexy as I stretched and perched on all fours to relieve the baby pressure on my back.  Then he would kiss me goodbye and say, "I love you so much."  As he always did.  Then he would kiss my belly goodbye.  Then he would leave through the garage, and I would never see him again.

Oh, I wish I could hear the garage door open and know that it was George coming or going.
Oh, I wish I could believe he was still alive.  
But then again, I don't.  

It's too hard to have glimpses in my mind of -- "Oh, George is still here, right?  Because he is so near to me in my mind and heart!"  -- only to realize a second later that no, of course, George is still dead.  My heart breaks a little more all over again.  So I don't wish to believe he is alive.  I wish to know he is dead.  I wish to accept this and be thankful for all the reasons I miss him.  I miss him because I love him so dearly.  I would not trade this love for the world.

I wonder why the 1-year mark is so significant, why we spend weeks and months anxiously anticipating the day.  It's just a day like any other day that George is not here.  It doesn't hurt any more or any less.  It is a new day.  It is a different day.  It did not rain last night.  It is not Groundhog Day.  George is not going to die again today.  George died once, and he never has to do it again.  And I don't have to keep my mind hostage thinking about it like there is something I can do at 9:03 a.m. today that is going to change anything to bring him back.  It is a different time altogether.  Nothing in the world is quite the same as it was one year ago.  

We put all of this emphasis on these anniversaries, but we are only imprisoning ourselves with the idea of time, and that it means more than another step into the future.  It is just a way of guiding us forward, moving us constantly and steadily into the next phase of our life, the next adventure, the next opportunity, the next glimmer of hope.  We try to look back when we have lost things we didn't want to lose.  We grasp at them, grasp at the memories, our own distorted realities of what we imagine happened in a previous life.  We mourn them and we torture ourselves with longing, and we think somehow this makes our grief more meaningful.  It does not.

My grief is no more today than yesterday, last week, last month.  No more today than tomorrow.  In fact, my grief is more polished today than ever before, distilled down to its essence, broken into its components and understood for all of its qualities.  Six months ago, I knew there was grief, but I could not sit quietly with it, I could not tell you how it made me feel.  My work over the past 3 months has been rewarded with a new relationship, that of me to myself, to my pain and grief, to the parts of me that I didn't want to uncover or accept.  It is this new relationship that will power me forward into my new life.

And, I am... almost... ready.  

There was a life I wanted with George.  There was a life that I thought belonged to me.  One year ago, that dream dissolved.  My expectation of it did not.  I have been holding onto the dream of the dream, the desire for something that will never be mine.  The desire for something that was never mine to begin with.  And, as comforting as it is to hold onto the things we love and attach to and identify ourselves with, there is a time to Let Go.  To continue to perpetuate this attachment is to deny myself the gift of living fully.  It is to keep my being in the past, to keep George in the past, and to keep a distance from everyone around me who is here to share in the gifts of a new world.  Choosing to let go is not to say I let go of George, but I let go of the life we hoped to have together, the presence of his body, and our relationship as I knew it.  We have a new relationship now.

And choosing to let go does not mean that I do not grieve.  I can continue to grieve through while exploring this new landscape of living life without George.  "Living" being the key word, which is very different from "Surviving".

I survive by breathing.
I live by leading.
I am a different person than I was one year ago.  I am in many ways a more complete and more wholly formed human.  I have a space in my heart where human George lived.  That space is now free to dream and explore and embark on new adventures.  This is the magic and the power of the human experience and our inherent strength and resilience.  We have the choice -- we always have the choice -- to charge into the future, choose the unknown, embrace the delicacy of life, and be Free.  
​<3