2024 has been a dark year

Chris, 1958-2024

Starting from now, I am making myself yet another promise to get back to blogging here, because I feel like I have things to say and not enough people to say them to. 

 I lost my husband in February. He had a lot of health issues, many of which were from his lifestyle, and one big one that was a rare genetic disorder. The lifestyle health issues contributed, but the big genetic disorder ultimately killed him.

He was my best friend, and we loved talking about stuff. All stuff. He was the person to bounce things off on, the person to come home to, the person to play board games with or spend hours on YouTube with or cuddle with. We met in 2009 and married in 2017.  It would have been exactly 15 years we were together had he lived another three months. 

He is gone and I am very bereft. 

I live with my grown son and three remaining cats - we also lost our oldest, amazing, beautiful cat later in the year. We are coping with a lot of grief for my husband, the cat and our values (now that we have also had a very traumatic national election that did not go the way we were hoping). 

 Hold your loved ones very close. If you have a choice between vegging out and doing an activity with them, do the activity. Many of them will be gone before you are, and those activities will create memories that sustain you in your grief. Love yourself but don't forget to check in with others you care about. If you are having a difficult time, maybe they are too. The best thing to do in grief, I've found, is to help each other. Just grieving together is much less soul-crushing than grieving alone. 

Commemorate those you've lost, through your own rituals and your own thoughts. Memory is a very weird, subjective, often objectively false thing but it is all we have from our pasts. 

 If you're reading this, bookmark and check back in. I will once again try to be more regular in screaming into the void.