Category: losing matt

sometimes I feel like the thing I hate the most is my lack of (perceived) stability at times. when Matt was alive, even when he was in the hospital or not doing well, I still felt basically stable and grounded and assured of his love for me. I knew that as long as he was alive, he’d be with me.

now though, not only do I realize that I am never really assured of stability, but I also don’t have anyone in my life who is committed to loving me as much as Matt did. there are two sides of that coin; on the one hand, it means that I could pretty much pick up and go anywhere – I have no real roots in Nashville anymore except Katie. on the other hand, this makes me feel like I’m drowning sometimes. or like I’m drifting in the ocean, and am affected by everything that causes a current near my life. I have never been good at accepting and embracing instability.

sometimes I feel like withdrawing from everyone except my closest and dearest friends, and spending more time in the woods. I’m going to try to at least spend time in the woods this weekend. I know the woods – they are my friends. they have always been there for me, and always make me feel better, and I feel at home in them. in the woods, I almost feel more whole than I do when I’m at home.

This post is not going to be entirely about the memorialization process. But I did finally download all of Matt’s messages from FB, and then requested that his page be memorialized.

I’ve reached a point where I don’t think about Matt as much as I used to. It’s hard to quantify this for you guys, though, because I still think about him every day and very frequently. I don’t dwell on what life used to be like while he was alive and married to me, though. It’s so, so painful to remember how happy I was. I read through a few of the messages from FB after downloading them though, which is making it really hard to ignore how much I miss Matt.

Katie made a good point over the weekend. She said that for the first year after she was separated, she would compare her life to whatever she was doing this time last year. I do this all the time too. This time last year, for example, we were both trying to get back into the habit of daily exercise and eating well – and I was happy. I’m almost looking forward to passing February 21st this year, because after that I’ll be able to say – “This time last year I was paralyzed with grief,” or “This time last year the only thing that mattered to me was that Matt was gone,” or whatever. I think it will be good for my perspective, and encouraging. But I’m not there yet…still have fucking Valentine’s Day to live through, not to mention the 21st itself.

Anyway.

I had an extremely unproductive weekend (unless you could making a couple of journals – but that’s the only thing that counts as productive). I’m remembering that I enjoy life a lot more when it has structure, and when I’m disciplined enough to live by that structure. So, I’m making myself a To Do list today. There are several things that I need to take care of (e.g. clean out the garage, get a new washing machine, do all of my laundry) – but most immediately I want to work on keeping my house nice and clean, and getting out of the house more often. Especially on weekends.

So I have been pretty much ignoring Christmas this year. I put up a tree in hopes that it would make me feel more Christmas-y, but it hasn’t, even two days before Christmas. This weekend I got most of my wrapping knocked out, which was less fun than usual. Not only did I not have to shop for Matt this year, but all my gift tags say, depressingly, “from Erin” and no one else.

I don’t talk to Matt all that much these days, but I did over the weekend…remembering how much he hated Christmas and how he’s probably glad (if he could be) that he’s missing it this year. But that no one else is.

It’s very hard to stand aside and let people you love do things that you don’t think they should, even when they are convinced that it’s the right thing for them. It’s hard because you don’t know what’s going on inside anyone’s brain but yours. And though I am regrettably quick to judge other people based on my own personal experiences that I perceive as having similarities to their situation, I realize that I really shouldn’t do that at all. The more I experience of life, the more I realize that experiences are not universal and that it’s stupid for me to assume that they are.

That to say…I really wish Matt was here, and I don’t think I would ever say that he did the right thing, but certainly he thought he did. And though I was the person closest to Matt, I still wasn’t ever inside his brain. So I don’t know.

What I do know is that around this time last year, I was getting last-minute Christmas shopping done while Matt was home relaxing; I checked our bank account balance after leaving Target and saw the transaction for the necklace that he bought me last year. I had bitched and complained about how I didn’t want to TELL him what I wanted for Christmas – I wanted him to get me something that HE thought I’d like. So he got me this leaf pendant from one of his favorite fantasy series. And I remember seeing that transaction and thinking that this was one of the best feelings in the world – my husband getting me a Christmas present that he picked out because he thought I would like it. And that I got to go home to him and shower him with love, pretending not to have noticed the order.

So that’s my favorite Christmas memory from last year, and now I’m crying again – great.

I’m feeling kind of depressed this morning. Probably has a lot to do with the fact that I stayed up until midnight playing Skyrim, and woke up around 7:20 this morning. I grabbed the clothes that were easiest to get to, didn’t take a shower, and got McDonald’s for breakfast. The coffee helped, anyway. I didn’t get up in time for a walk this morning either (yesterday I got in 1.5 miles before work). Plus, it’s been 9 months today and also it’s been 39 weeks today. And Thanksgiving is in one week.

I always considered Thanksgiving to be our anniversary, because I remember lying in bed with Matt on Thanksgiving morning, 2007, and telling him for the first time that I loved him and that I had decided that I wanted to be his girlfriend. He never thought of Thanksgiving in the same way because he had already decided that he wanted to date me, but whatever. It was our anniversary in my mind, and next week would have marked 6 years together.

I’m liable to start crying at work if I keep thinking about this.

Some days…I just want to go home and stay there indefinitely. I want Matt back…and since I can never have him again, I want something else that will make me feel better, comfortable, at home. My house doesn’t make me feel loved or anything, but it’s better than being at the office.

I miss Matt so fucking much. Nine months…I guess I knew that it wouldn’t be a ton easier by this time, especially because of the holidays. After New Years, there’s a month to go before the one year mark. I have no clue how I’ll react to living that day again. I am such a broken record…saying the same things over and over, crying about the same things, doing the same things to make myself feel better. I feel stable some days. Other days I don’t give a flying fuck. I can’t believe that the love of my life left me. Abandoned me. Killed himself. Thought that he wasn’t worthy of my love, and thought that he couldn’t give me what I deserved.

I don’t know when I’ll be ready to start dating again. Because I still find myself comparing other men to Matt, which is natural, but I find myself not wanting to be interested in them if they lack certain qualities that Matt had. Which is SO DUMB. Other times, when I’m not feeling like this, I think I am ready to start caring about another person. But…I still am looking for the same connection that Matt and I had. When people say that they don’t believe in True Love or in marriage, I want to yell at them. I had a perfect marriage, until things started getting bad – but that was only going to make our marriage stronger, if Matt had been able to keep going. So, yeah, ultimately my marriage was not perfect. But…I guess all I’m saying is that it wasn’t my fault.

Fuck. Sometimes…I still just want to DO SOMETHING TO FIX THIS FUCKING SITUATION. But I still can’t. There is still absolutely nothing that I can do to change anything, except as I’m able to change and deal internally. I don’t know how to make it stop hurting so much though.

So.

This is something I’m still struggling with a lot. It’s not as bad as it used to be, but the only reason that I can tell is because I can see the problem with more clarity now. Basically……..it’s the problem of knowing that Matt is dead, and of proceeding with MY life in light of that fact. He’s never coming back. I will never meet anyone like him again, either. The idiosycracies and habits and thoughts and EVERYTHING about Matt that made me fall in love with him – I’ll never see that combined into one person ever again. Probably the closest I’ll ever get is either me, or Ryan, but neither of us make the cut.

I loved Matt so much. I still do, but I’m somehow supposed to transfer the love that it was while he was alive into a love that keeps him “alive” inside me now. I have no earthly idea how to do this, so I haven’t been thinking about it much. I’m just trusting that it will gradually happen, I guess, maybe without me even noticing.

It still baffles my mind to realize that I can devote all of my energy to one person, only to have them die. Die. Not live anymore. That energy that I gave Matt – I have no idea where it is now. I guess I still have all the energy that he gave me, but everything I gave him is gone. And I gave so much. Gone. And somehow I’m going to get used to this; at some point, Matt’s death will be a part of my past and I won’t have to consciously accept it.

For right now though, I’m still baffled and depressed by the fact that this life I am living now IS MY LIFE. The part that is missing is never coming back, so this is it. How can it be that the person I loved the most in the world could just…die? Disappear forever from my life? I wonder if subconsciously, some part of me is holding on, hoping beyond all rational thought that Matt will just show up again. I can’t pinpoint these thoughts, but I can see evidence of their hidden existence.

For my anniversary yesterday, I bought myself red roses at Costco, and two bottles of champagne (one for me and one for Ryan, who came over to hang out some). Ryan made me a necklace. I sewed some and read some. It was pretty uneventful. I wanted to assure the lady at the liquor store that I was not going to have a fun evening, despite my red roses and two bottles of champagne, but I didn’t.

Our wedding anniversary wasn’t ever that big of a deal – to me anyway. Granted, we only celebrated two of them, but I can’t actually remember what we did last year. I suspect we either got sushi, or went to the Brewhouse, but I can’t remember. We had planned earlier in the year to celebrate at the Catbird Seat, but with hospital bills and such we didn’t have the money last year. This year was going to be better. This year we were going to make reservations.

October 1 2010. It was a very pretty day. We took our marriage license to the county clerk’s office, had to sign some papers and pay some money, and John Arriola himself married us. Then I think I texted a couple of people, and we went to Siam Cuisine for a celebratory lunch. I don’t even know what we did the rest of the day, other than go home and luxuriate in each other’s company.

Dawn sent me the nicest email this morning. Sure it made me cry, but what else is new. It’s so, so easy for me to have these thoughts – why did Matt manage to stay alive without me so long, but 5 years after meeting me he decided he couldn’t do it anymore? If I hadn’t ever met him, would he still be alive? He decided that he wanted to get therapy BECAUSE OF me. FOR me. He didn’t want to fuck up our marriage, and that’s why he decided to go back to therapy. So it’s plausible that he might still be alive now if we had never met. But Dawn wrote to me about how happy Matt had been with me. And other people have told me this too – as if I couldn’t see it myself (because sometimes I can’t). We were BOTH happier than we’d ever been in our lives.

And it’s all over now. The best that I can do now is try to salvage the horrible, horrible situation. Somehow I need to take all the love and happiness that Matt gave me, and use it to better myself and to help other people. I am such a selfish person though.

I have no idea how I’m going to “celebrate” today. I can’t come up with anything that I want to do (except be with Matt). I might just go home and sit on the floor and cry a while.