"More than anything else..

...I'm sorry for myself, living without you...."

If you noticed, until the post I made on 4/8, I hadn't posted for over a month. The entry of 4/8 was actually started the first week of March, but sat as a draft for weeks while I did everything else but write on the blog.

I don't know why I took a leave of absence from the blog, but even though I thought of it a lot, I just could not bring myself to open it, read it or add to it. I was avoiding it. Many times, ideas and thoughts came up that I could have written about, but the act of logging in to write just didn't happen.

I have felt strangley 'quiet' inside the last month. That's the only way I can describe how this feels. Certain things that used to be so upsetting before just don't upset me as much. Not enough to amplify their importance by writing about it, anyway. Gary's repeated advice to me, "Let it go." echos in my head so often now that I think I finally am able to take that advice from him. He's just a year older than me, but in some ways he seemed to have absorbed more of a mellowed common sense than I have.  Maybe it had something to do with having Parkinson's, because that's when he developed a more easy going attitude. So, thanks for that, Gary.

Additionally, posting these blog posts is mentally trying.  I cry when writing and editing them, although when I read them after they are posted, they seem almost emotionless.  So, by avoiding the blog entirely, I was trying to put some distance between me and runny mascara for a short time.

I was sweeping the garage this morning with a push broom that Gary has had since the cabinet shop days. I should sell it, because we have two and don't need two.  But this one shows the paint worn off on the handle where Gary placed his hands so many times. Now I put my hands in those same spots and remember.  Then is when I realized, that this is the stuff that I want to tell people about in the blog.  This is what makes it worth writing about the things I remember, big and small, about my husband.

Even without logging into the blog, the week before last I had two awful days where I could not stop crying.  Everything made me so sad that Gary is not here with me.  Maybe it is God, or maybe its Gary speaking to me, but lately I often feel that some 'thing' is getting into my head with whispers and thoughts(no, not voices) that make sense. After those two exceptionally bad days, I was sitting down, just putting my shoes on, and I 'felt' the words of this thought: "I am not sorry for Gary, but I am sorry for myself." 
I know on a previous entry I wrote that in Gary's last days here in our house, he told me, as tears ran down his face,  "I'm not crying for me dying.  I'm crying for leaving you all alone after I'm gone." Now I do cry for me. It is self pity and I don't feel it constantly, but it makes its comeback now and then.

The year of anniversaries marches on.  I got through an angry anniversary- the one on March 13 when it was one year since Gary had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. April 9 was another anniversary. It had been one year since Gary's last day of work. Next comes Gary's birthday on April 13.  That date in 2012 found us in the radiology department at Scottsdale Healthcare while I sat listening to Gary talk to the tech, telling her it was his birthday and she responding cheerily, "Well, Happy Birthday!" as he recieved his first CT scan to show a baseline of where and how big the tumors were before he began chemo. Just the other day I ran across the folder they gave us that day.  It has "Happy Birthday!" and a smiley face written on it by a person in records. It was not a happy birthday, though.  We were staying in a motel in North Phoenix, it was already hot and Gary was depressed at all of the changes he had been through in just one month.  We went to Paradise Valley Mall to eat at Ruby Tuesday and I went into a Body Shop store to use a gift card I had from there. Gary was too tired to walk any further and sat on a bench while I was in the store.  I came out with a gift set fit for a man.  Olive essence soap, liquid body wash, shampoo and olive body butter.  He liked it; especially as he had to start using the body wash in the shower instead of the bar of soap that he dropped but could no longer safely bend to pick up. He loved the body butter to rub on his dry skin and feet. I ended up using the shampoo up, as Gary's hair vanished down the drain soon thereafter. I finished off the body wash in January. Last week I watched the last sliver of his pretty olive green bar soap slip down the sink and I have just one more swipe left of the body butter.  I am thinking that I will buy another set this year for his birthday as a small way of remembering a simple pleasure he got from it.

I think that Gary's 57th birthday will actually be better than his 56th- for both of us.  Gary is no longer doomed to go through something so painful, frightening and horrifying to us both. He has no dashed hopes, no sleepless nights or endless days, no anxiety, no sadness, no regrets about what he did and didn't do, or couldn't do.  In comparison to what he had to deal with last year, our journey now is a piece of cake.  I will NEVER say, however, that he 'is in a better place'. The best place for Gary is still HERE, cancer-free, working, laughing and getting to grow old with or without me.

I plan to celebrate the way Gary would have if he had been able to last year.  With family/friends who are one in the same at an 'All You Care To Eat' buffet complete with cake frosting and soft serve ice cream.

And later, when I open the wrapping on the new bar of Olive Essence soap, I can breathe in the fresh smell of Gary after he stepped out of the shower.  And I will remember how good that is.