Building a Life Alongside, 2022

Patar, summer, 2022
mini-update

Looking back, Gretchen thought that perhaps he had known. Everything was so prepared and ready, how could he not have known.

He had visited with the grandchildren, taking them for ice-cream. He had sat and talked for hours with Susie. He made sure that they had plenty of date nights and spent the evenings softly caressing her face.

His last words to her were that she looked so beautiful.

Death came and cruelly took her love away.

She spent days in tears, mourning and grieving.

How could she go on.

She knew that she would go on, this wasn't her first time with grief. It wasn't her first time learning how to adapt her life to her new normal where a piece of her heart was gone, where her world had shattered. It was how she met Lyndon, leading one of those grief workshops. He was a year removed from his wife's death, she was several years removed from the death of her husband and daughter in a car accident. They were driving to the hospital to be with her as she delivered their son, Patrick. Gretchen wondered why they never showed up for the birth when the police officer arrived and turned Patrick's birthday into the death anniversary of her husband and young daughter. 

She knew that she would have to relearn skills, arrange herself around the harsh changes that life had given her. She was well aware that it was ok, that she was not ok. She knew that she would spend years building a life alongside grief instead of trying to overcome it in a matter of weeks.

Then the phone call came. It was a travel agent. Apparently Lyndon had booked her a solo vacation, to be given a few weeks after his death.

She didn't want to go, but when the agent read the letter that her husband had left behind, she knew that she had to go...for Lyndon...for herself...to start building her life alongside grief.