Unexplainable...

Dear Michael,

I miss you.

We participated in Thanksgiving this year as opposed to last year when we just had to avoid all things related to the Holiday. The entire time my mind was racing with thoughts of you. I forced myself to participate.

I prepared a good meal, all the while remembering all of the times you were here for dinner with the family. Conner even commented as he sat down with his plate, with tears welled up in his eyes, "Dad sure would like this food, mom." We just had a quiet moment looking at each other and nodding while everyone else was still filling their own plates.

I miss you.

My mom wanted a real tree for Christmas this year so we drove the farm, everyone loaded into your truck, and searched for the perfect tree. I drove in silence most of the way and cried. Mom sat beside me, patted  me on the leg and said, "I love you," over and over. I found no joy in what should have been a beautiful moment: Mom'a three grandchildren and her two daughters doing the old fashioned Christmas tree hunt. Instead though, I was sad.

I miss you.

I have found that I am SO much more quiet and drained than I ever have been before. I can't explain it to people. The only ones who understand are unfortunately the ones who are part of widowhood themselves. I can't explain the tug at my stomach that literally stays with me as I walk through every day, nauseated with nerves. I can't explain the switch that has been flipped that seriously requires each moment of laughter, each glimmer of a smile, to be forced. I have never had to FORCE myself to smile or laugh or enjoy life's most precious moments. But here I am, forcing just about everything.

I miss you.

I miss your laugh, your light. I miss your hands to hold and your broad shoulders to lean on. I miss your kisses and your compliments. I miss your presence in all things, whether it meant that your were physically home from work or just that I knew you would be coming home from work. The reality always existed that you WOULD be coming home. And now that reality is gone. And that is the most difficult thing to imagine or to try to explain.

Conner told me the other day, while he and I had a snuggle fest in his bed, "Mom, sometimes when I think about Dad, I have to look at a picture because I can't see his face perfect anymore." And he feels guilty about that. He feels guilty that his image of you is beginning to not be as clear as it was two years ago. And it's not that Conner has forgotten what you look like; it's just that enough time has passed that he is scared to death of forgetting what you look like. He's afraid of forgetting your voice. I cannot begin to explain to anyone how much this hurts and literally kills a piece of me.

I miss you... but HE misses you so much more because YOU are missing him growing up.

You are missing these mood swings that sometimes just about push me over the edge. Ugh...12 is SO HARD and I can't imagine what it's like without a dad. Our son literally has NO male influences in his life. Not ones that actually come around. I mean, so many of them SAY they will but then rarely, if ever, actually show up. I can't begin to fathom what goes through Conner's mind when he needs his dad. Anger, disappointment, sorrow, frustration, confusion, isolation, abandonment, fear....so on and so on.

Everyday I carry so much that it is weighing me down and robbing me of my soul's happiness. I am not happy. I am not ok. But I have to fake it every day just to get through. I have a job and bills and a son to raise. My own inner guilt and turmoil of knowing, KNOWING, that I have to move forward, that I cannot give up, that our son needs me more than ever, that I HAVE to be his everything, weighs more heavily on me with every passing day. I've heard so many times it makes me want to puke that "time heals all wounds." I call BS. No it doesn't. In my case, it often feels like time or making things worse for me. And it is unexplainable.

I wish you hadn't left us. I wish you had been happy with our 182 acre farm at Garwood and never brought us to this train wreck I'm in now, alone. I wish you had been happy with a "normal" job and paycheck and hadn't let your gazillion money ideas consume you and what time we should have had with you. I wish fall and winter were not such dreaded times for us now because they used to be our favorites. I wish you hadn't left me so much debt. I wish you hadn't gone to work that day, by that you had rested like I wanted you to. I wish so much, babe.

But more than anything, I wish our little boy's heart wasn't so broken and that mine would begin to heal. Because I have accepted reality, and it sucks, I now know that you're never coming back and that my life will never be the same. But it's so unexplainable to others how this makes us feel every moments of the day.

I miss you.
We miss you.

#stillhis
Love,
Your Wife

An Empty Chair...

Tomorrow for Thanksgiving families and friends will gather for a beautiful meal. Laughter will carry across the dinner rolls and the pie plates. Memories will be made and homes will be filled with love.

For many families during the holidays unfortunately, there will be an empty chair. An empty place setting at the table.

An empty chair sits at our table because Mike is not there. An empty chair means that we look around for him but he is nowhere to be found. 

All that remains is a void, a space where he should be. I'm trying to push this reality from my mind but after I loaded my vehicle down with holiday groceries earlier today, I had a full on breakdown the entire drive home. I haven't had a good "can't breathe, sob out loud, can't see the road" kind of cry in a while. And stupid pecan pie and cinnamon rolls did it.

The day my husband died I made cinnamon rolls. I literally have not been able to eat a cinnamon roll since that day. I had baked them and called Mike to tell him they were done. I asked if he wanted me to bring him some but he had already left the farm. Just a few hours later, when the cinnamon rolls had grown cold, the love of my life died, alone, at our concrete plant, and was found half hanging out of the concrete chute. His legs and hips were exposed but his front end was not visible, as it rested lifeless in the chute.

So cinnamon rolls, the kind from a can  that we can freshly bake on our own, are just one of my nemeses. And then there is pecan pie.

This Thanksgiving staple makes my chest tighten and my breaths become labored. Crazy, right? Mike loved pecan pie and one year it was my mom's duty to provide the sweets. Mike ate that pie and raved about how good it was, offering compliment after compliment to my mom. The evening continued and when he went back for another piece, he complimented again saying , "Good job on the pie, Jackie." To which mom replied, "oh, well I didn't make it...it's Marie Callendar."  Mike laughed so hard! He was like, I complimented her multiple times today and she never came clean until the very end and she literally just forgot she had actually bought it instead of made it!! For the Thanksgivings Mike was still alive after that, he teased my mom always with, "where's that famous pecan pie you make, Jackie?"

Goodness. So two foods that usually fill homes during Thanksgivig and Christmas are two that I just can no longer handle.

But the foods that cause me to go into near convulsive sobs don't hold a light to the empty chair. And it's not just the empty chair during the holidays but literally sometimes I catch myself while sitting in my recliner just looking over at my couch and it's just blank; there is no one there. 

Mike should be sitting right here... My husband, Conner's dad, Chris' son. But it remains empty.

And sure there could be someone in the chair to fill that space, but that chair might end up being empty for the rest of my life because I have set my standards high. Michael set them high, not only with what he did or said, but also with what he didn't do or say. So my standards, my expectations, my bare minimums that I will tolerate and fall in love with, are high. Not because I'm better than anyone by any stretch, but because I deserve good.

I deserve attention and affection. I had those with Michael and because of his attention and affection, I never doubted that my husband loved me in all my flaws.

I deserve honesty and openness. I THOUGHT I always had those with my husband; I have learned that I didn't. Not to the extent I should have. Otherwise, I would not be in probate court; life insurance policies would have all been correct; debt would not have been such an overwhelming surprise.

I deserve commitment and trust and loyalty.  Mike had his infidelities before me but I did not worry about his lack of commitment to me and to our son; however, as the years passed it seemed often that his commitment was directed more toward making money to pay for his business endeavors. And he didn't even know if either of his sons wanted a part of it all, but he committed his life to providing a dream for them and I'm angry about it because that's what killed him. He committed so hard to it that he got us both in so deep, he could never stop. Until it killed him.

I deserve laughter and compliments and love so deep. I deserve happiness and security and longevity. I deserve love unmatched.

That chair might be empty for the next 40 years, I don't know.  But I do know that for now, on the cusp of Thanksgiving and Christmas, and the two year mark, I will look at the empty chair and I will miss all of the good things about my husband that made me fall so hard in love with a dark-haired, dark complected, hard-working, generous man.

Please say a prayer for peaceful hearts and survival for all widows/widowers and their children and families.  Invite a widow to dinner! Open your home and heart to love and kindness and generosity and patience.

Grieving is a terribly difficult journey. Our empty chairs will always be a part of our lives, whether physically or metaphorically. Our loves are gone and we will miss them for the rest of our breaths.

May your home be filled with love and laughter, good food and good company, and may your chairs be filled with people you love.

God bless you all from The Hollis Family.
#stillhis
Love,
Veronica 

An Epic Fail...

WARNING--REALITY of widowhood post ahead. DO NOT comment statements of pity as that is NOT what I am looking for. I just need to vent and I think many people really have no idea the reality of solo life. Especially a young solo life.

Here I sit in my recliner, defeated and angry once again. I feel like I am DONE right now. D.O.N.E.

I am a mom.
My son is healthy and ornery and drives me insane but is my best blessing of all. I prayed for him. For years I prayed for the chance to be a mom. Yes, my son sometimes sends me into moments of near rage, but I would not be able to live one day without him.

I am a principal.
I have worked hard for my degrees and have had success in the education field. I have worked hard at any job I've held since I was 13 years old. I've always worked hard.

I am a widow.
A WIDOW. Wow. Not a role for which I bargained and often time I feel that I am an EPIC FAIL.

I did NOT pray for this title.
I did NOT work hard to earn it.

And I'm stuck with it!

Today I am drained. Physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually drained.

I started with an idea of what I was going to accomplish today, starting with building a dog kennel since our dog has begun wandering to the neighbors. I hate having to keep her tied so I decided she needs a pen.

Last weekend while Conner and I were riding around the farm, we stumbled upon a pile of things and found pieces for a chain link pen. What the heck?!?! I literally didn't even know we had one...or excuse me, that Michael had one. Angry at first that there was yet another thing I didn't know until after my husband died, I decided to push the anger at Michael to the side and put my newly found dog pen to good use. Not having to spend the money on a new pen was a relief.

I decided today that I would build it. I gathered, with Conner's help, the six pieces of chain link pen, fence posts to secure corners to, fence post driver which weighs a ton, wire to attach to fence posts, sledge hammer, regular hammer, and tin to cover a portion of the pen. A woman on a mission!

I loaded everything into the bed of the truck and began to unload at a spot in the yard where I could actually envision the pen and how well it would serve our dog Molly. I began working. Yep, I was gonna do it. It would be so cool to show people I did it myself.

I drove one fence post and began hammering the ends of the first piece of the chain link pen into the ground and things began to go wrong. And things continued to go wrong. I failed. I dropped everything and went to sit and cry.

I began messaging people asking for help. They all have lives and chores and jobs and families and no time for me and my ridiculous problems today. And I do not begrudge a single one of them for this!!! As a matter of fact, I am so incredibly happy that my friends have what I had almost two years ago.

My friends are such amazing people. They spend time with their children. They spend time with their spouses. They go to birthday parties and baby showers; they go watch movies together as a family; they are happily busy living their lives. Please know that I am so proud of each of you. You, the dear friends to whom I reached out today, are living the dream...my dream: a busy, happy, whole family. A husband, wife, and child(ten). I love you all...so I apologize for asking for help like I did today, but then declining invitations at other times.

I avoid birthday parties and baby showers. I am so sorry to all of you who have invited us over the past two years to your moments of celebration. But I just can't. I've tried, and I have found that I'm so focused on the absence of my husband and I look at our son and know that is exactly what he's thinking as well that I end up in tears or have to leave quickly so that I can cry on the drive home. I know that we have turned down dinner invitations or movie invitations. We have turned down just coming over to hang out.

I have also avoided attending church services often. I have such mixed emotions when I attend church and I cry, sometimes uncontrollably, every visit. I love The Lord and feel incredibly blessed and grateful for all He has given to me and to our son. But I am also sometimes so angry and sad, and sometimes it's over stupid little things like the epic fail of preparing a dog pen, that I cannot face The Lord. I feel guilty for being angry. And also we avoid it sometimes for the looks. We avoid everything and everyone sometimes because of the looks. And don't get me wrong, I know that the people who love us and care for us are only concerned for us and see that I am a different person than before. The looks mean genuine concern and I know that, BUT still it makes me feel like my absolute despair shows so loudly on my face, and I HATE that this is who I am now.

I am so incredibly sorry. But know that when I reply "I'm not feeling well", or "Conner isn't feeling well," I'm not lying. Depression, the bone aching kind, has settled into me and I can't seem to shake it off. I try. Believe me I try. Every second of every minute of every hour of every day I try.

But some days, and today is one of those days, I can't. I'm done. I can't face people or pretend one second of today. I pretend all day most days and sometimes the pretending ends up bringing me genuine laughter and genuine smiles. But many more times it is still just all forced.

So today I reached out for help again because I am an EPIC FAIL as a solo ANYTHING (and for sure as a dog pen builder) and I ended up realizing I owe so many of my family and friends an apology. To some I'm sure it seems like the only time I reach out is when I need something. I HATE being THAT person. I'm sorry. I truly am. I am grateful to each of you, whether all of our memories are old or we still try to make new ones when we have time. A few of you are still the diehard amazing people who text me regularly to check on us. Please know I want to return with all of my heart, I really do. I'm still trying and I still need your love, support, and prayers. I promise I won't be an EPIC FAIL at friendship and family, or at love and happiness forever.

I just still miss my husband and love and happiness and holding a handsome man's hand. I'm just still really sad.

Love,
Veronica