The days after...

In the days following Mike's death, there was a lot of chaos and things got pretty crazy. Crazy in a good way with lots of family around and support coming from all corners of the Earth. Food galore - when people die the first instinct others have is to give them food so they don't have to worry about cooking or shopping. And probably so they actually eat something, because I can tell you this, I didn't have an appetite for one thing for days. if not weeks. I still feel sick to my stomach most of the time, so eating is hard. My kitchen was scrubbed from top to bottom, and looked better than I had ever kept it (I started joking that Mike wouldn't recognize the place if he were there). I had to tell the kids what had happened - we waited until Monday to do that, so that I could read a little bit about how you tell kids about the death of a parent. Not light reading like reading People Magazine, that's for sure. That is a conversation I will never forget. For Adella, she's still too young to understand. I just told her that there was an accident and daddy is gone and he can't come back. Gunnar understands a bit better. He understands at a minimum that daddy is dead and he can't come back, and that when people die their body stops working. He knows it was a motorcycle accident and daddy hit a tree and when that happened he hit his head. But then came the questions. How did it happen. Why did it happen. Detailed questions, the mind of a 5 year old can only think up. Questions I don't have the answers to, and probably never will. We now have daily conversations about missing daddy, asking for daddy and having to explain over and over again that he's gone and he can't come back but that he's always with us in our hearts. We read books (thanks to many friends who sent them!) about being connected to our loved ones even when they aren't physically here. We look at pictures.
Then arrangements started to be made. The service and calling hours would be Friday 4/25. Another date etched into my memory now. There were a lot of decisions to be made. Cremation or burial. Where. What. How. A blur of decisions (thank God for family to help make them, I couldn't have done it on my own). We needed photos to put up. We needed clothes to put him in. There were (and still are) piles of logistics to get through. Mike didn't have a will. There's probate, and insurance claims, and decisions to be made about lots things. There's a truck, a tractor, a house - all of which were a part of 'us'. Which is now just 'me'. And what do I do with it? There's a lot of stuff - if I've learned anything about my husband these past few weeks it's that he saved a lot. Scratch that, he saved everything! And most times I just sit and laugh about it - especially since in a recent argument I remember him telling me how there wasn't any room for his stuff because my stuff was everywhere... Nice one honey. But I am afraid you win 'the most stuff' game!
His laundry is on the bedroom floor. His photos are all over the house. His lunchbox is on our kitchen cart where he normally kept it. His toothbrush is in the holder. His soap is in the shower. He is everywhere and I don't want that to change. Not yet. And mostly, at this point, I'm not ready to part with any of it. They are constant reminders to me that he was here with us. That he existed. And perhaps I'm not quite ready to concede to the fact that he really is, in fact, gone. I can say it. I certainly feel it - it's as though an elephant is sitting on my chest and I can't quite breathe. And that stays with me 24 hours a day. But I'm fairly certain that there's a little part of me still hoping it's not true and that at some point I will wake up from this extremely long nightmare (which is what this feels like) and he'll be right there - walking through the door from work, or in bed next to me. And I'll look at him and say 'you will NOT believe the dream I just had about you!'. Because I have had this dream before, when he was living. I would dream every now and then that he had died and would jolt out of sleep to find him there next to me. And in my mind I'm hoping that's what will happen again. But each day I wake up and it's not a dream. It's reality.