I have been struggling to post here. Grief is likely the biggest culprit in why I haven’t been able to. Grief is weird and hits when you’re not looking for it. I mean, there’s the immediate stuff. That’s the part most people recognize. Up front, right after the shock wears off. Tears, snot bubbles, and all the red faced terrible that goes with it. It’s expected and relatively understood.

It’s later. Sometime down the road, after the dust has settled and people have gotten back into their daily routines… there’s still this thing that can happen. Grief just keeps showing up.

There’s insomnia. That’s a fun one. You just can’t sleep because something’s not right and it will never be all the way right again. You look terrible, your eyes are already bloodshot and this is just piling on. There’s all the things still jumbling around in your head. Your brain won’t shut down and even when you think you’re too exhausted to go on it pops up some other thing that you needed to do and forgot.

There’s the diet plan – or lack of plan. You eat take out more times in a month than you have in the past five years. The things you paid attention to slide to the side and things don’t really taste as good as they did before. In our case particularly, we had a host of dietary restrictions we were working with for my wife. Lists of things we could and couldn’t get. None of that mattered any more. That’s a stutter when you look at the prices you had been paying and realize you don’t have to now.

Even that settles after a while. You sort of try to get a new routine. You figure out things, make lists of paperwork and stop missing deadlines. Changes are there, but they’ve settled down and day to day function happens.

Then the stupidest detail slams into you, or somebody very close to you and you’re a weeping mess again.

I woke up to find my daughter asleep in her mother’s chair one morning rather than in bed. I was a mess for days and I didn’t know what to say to her about it.

We ordered pizza. I thought it would be a great idea to add dessert, so ordered the brownies. She opened the brownies box and it was cut into nine pieces. Perfectly divisible for the three of us and now we’re crying all over again because nine divided in half means Beck’s not here. You can’t just do 3, 3 and 3. Half a brownie is terrible.

So, I’m working on it. 95 days as of the first of November when I’m writing this. Just outside those 90 day business windows. Too long and somehow just as if it was yesterday. I’ve been told that things get better. I’m starting to see changes, but I don’t know that I would call any of them better. We will see as time marches on. We’re heading into the holiday season and it’s going to be rough.

I will get back to this. I will continue to tell stories and to write and play games. It will just take time, because grief is weird.