Taking care of you does not stop…

Trigger warning: Death, loss, and grief

Thank you all for the comments and support. They mean so much to me! I was hoping this week was going to be the week to respond to everyone and comment back. I’ve planning his funeral and this week was my first week back at work (more on that in a bit).

Here are my thoughts of the week:

• I am back at work but I am remote. I am grateful my work has two weeks of bereavement leave. I did not want to exhaust my bereavement leave all at once because the funeral was going to happen in three weeks. I thought to break my bereavement leave up and take the second week on the week of his memorial service, which is April 1st. The good thing about being back at work: I get to occupy a few hours out of my day not planning for a funeral and closing his stuff. The sad thing about being back at work: Knowing I have to return to a normal life without him. I am grateful to have the privilege of remote work this week because I had appointments such his supervisors dropping off his stuff, a meeting with the chaplain, and a meeting with a couple of people from his HR. Though I worked, I was interrupted throughout the day with dealing his stuff. Remote work also allowed cry and let myself grief and think about our future.

• My former roommate is a fellow widow. Less than a year ago, my former roommate lost his wife. He told me how alone he was because he didn’t know any other widows/widowers less than 40 years ago. Now it’s a club of two. Talking with him has validated my feelings no matter how ugly they got. He’s been spending a lot of his time writing too. Our conversations have revived some of his writings that have sat in drafts. Who knows maybe we’ll end up with a podcast.

• I have not had an opportunity to write a eulogy. I just thought about the eulogy this past Wednesday. I talked to my former roommate on how long I should go about the eulogy and where does one begin? Since then I’ve been talking to more people for feedback. Of course, it will start off with how we met and our lives together. The thing I am struggling with the most is sharing the first twenty-four years of his life. He didn’t have the best childhood — they grew up poor and he was always picked on and later in early adulthood, taken advantage of. He always strived to do better but was ridiculed for trying. For him, high school was the worst. He was picked on so much, he stopped caring about trying and dropped out of high school. He got his GED six months after he was supposed to graduate. He didn’t surround himself with the best people. He never elaborated but he always told me he would never let Lana have the childhood and never wished I had his childhood in order to be “relatable.” As much as I want to have people marvel at his trajectory from poverty to a gold-collar worker with a six-figure job, I also want to call out the people who wronged him because he didn’t deserve to be treated the way he did. I don’t want to euphemize it because it wouldn’t be genuine, and it would make me really uncomfortable swallowing my real feelings. I might as well point to people in the audience saying “you are a piece of crap, you are a piece of crap, you are a piece of crap.” Also, my husband knows me as the confrontational type and in some strange way, calling things out can bring us peace.

• But I also have to attribute that I haven’t had time to write a eulogy because everyone is asking me about my (and Lana’s) whereabouts every hour. Despite that, I still answer all phone calls and text messages. I get that it comes from a position of care and love but it’s getting borderline infantilizing and it has put me in a dangerous situation. My mom tried calling and texting me several times but I couldn’t pick up because I driving. The purpose of the call was the check if I left the house already but it is followed by several questions. The thing was, I already told her my plans for the day on how I was going to step out of the house to run errands. I am usually not the type to pick up phone calls while driving especially if it requires me to think. A few years ago at a previous job, the IT manager had a question about a purchase request I was making. She called me while I was driving. I was in the middle of traffic and the car I had at the time was a stick shift. The thing that annoyed me was that she kept asking me so many questions when I told her repeatedly that I clearly didn’t have the information in front of me right now because I was so engaged on the road. Did she expect me to pull up my laptop while driving? Since that incident, I disabled my phone to take phone calls while driving for years… I think I may need to do that again. It’s also becoming counterproductive because there are times when I am trying to get Lana to nap so I can take care of stuff but instead I’m so pre-occupied with answering questions about my whereabouts and it becomes a rabbit hole on why I am living the way I am living (i.e. “why are you working from home?” “why are you eating takeout?”). Again, I understand it is coming from a place of love and concern but I’m already up to my eyeballs.

• One thing I learned about his passing is that the care does not stop because he’s gone. I feel now more than ever I have to take care of him. It’s like I have to protect him.

…And yes, I have many more thoughts…I gave myself an hour to write.

Anyways, this weekend we were supposed to go to San Diego for a robotics competition. He volunteered there for the last two years and it’s given him a lot of meaning and joy. It gave him the high school experience he never had. After thinking about it so hard, I am still going down to San Diego. Initially, I wasn’t supposed to volunteer, but we already booked the hotel in San Diego. I see that volunteering is a way to celebrate him because this part of his life meant so much him. My trip to San Diego will be really short. On Sunday, I am leaving San Diego first thing in the morning to meet up with his coworkers. They organized a get-together to celebrate him.

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