Wishing....

We go through life most of the time blindly just doing what comes naturally and living life.  Every once and a while we have significant conscious choices to make - whether we take a new job, buy a new home, move to a new city, get married, etc.  But still we get into a groove in life and we tend to just go with it.  Whether we get married, stay single, live with a friend - we just groove through life living the "normal".

Then every once in a while something drastic happens and the normal ceases to be.   We stop grooving through life and we are left reeling.  We might discover a new "normal" for awhile, but we are really stumbling and grasping at life - trying to make sense of why us?  We struggle to understand why did this change happen have to happen to us?

As the five year anniversary of that "change" approaches for us  (The anniversary being when Patty was diagnosed with leukemia on August 4, 2006.) I find myself grasping.  I thought I had adjusted to a new normal.  I thought I had reestablished my identity but I have come to realize that I have such a long way to go.

This isn't being driven by the final end of the relationship with Shelly.  Though at times I do believe that the relationship with Shelly put a brief scab over the wound.  The wound of the loss of Patty has never healed, it has never moved to the point of becoming scar tissue.

I just want "normal" to return!  I want it the way that it was before that horrible day of August 4, 2006.  What makes the situation that much worse is that the world for the most part doesn't get where I am.  Until you have been there you really don't get it.  One of the things that Shelly could never understand is why I wasn't head over heals in my desire to marry her as soon as possible.  Nor could her family really understand why I didn't want to make a big fuss over the wedding and marriage.  Shelly always thought that there was something "broken" inside me because I hesitated on marriage.  It wasn't that I hesitated - it was that by rushing into a marriage with her I was forsaking the past I had with Patty.  She assumed that I was like her, that I had never been married and that I was eager to just rush into the future without considering all the places that I had been in the past.  She and her family couldn't consider all that I had lived through Patty's sickness and death wasn't the same that Shelly had experienced through her years of searching for a partner.  We were approaching our union for exact opposite directions - and those opposition directions were never going to work.

Shelly couldn't understand that I had already had the "fairy tale" wedding.  I had already had the "fairy tale marriage".  And then it had all ended with death.  It wasn't that I couldn't have had these thing with her, it was that I had just already experienced them with my life mate and doing it a second time wasn't a priority to me.

So today I wish a wish....  I wish for "normal" to return.  I don't know that it ever will.    I wish Shelly could have understood the situation I found myself in after Patty's death, but I don't think it was within her capacity to understand.  She had been wired to think of a one time marriage that was based upon the fairy tales of childhood.  She wasn't capable of thinking of marriage of something else - which in my case was a return to "normal".  Unfortunately for her - I don't know that there are a lot of 40 something men who think of marriage in the terms in which she does.  For me - I know what is important now and as hard as I tried to spin the dream for Shelly I know that she wasn't going to accept what I could offer.  Instead, I can only hope for that special person who understands where I have been and that I understand where she has been.  Maybe I have found her already - I am too scared to consider that at this point - only time will tell.

It's almost Friday again - yippee!!  I have had 2 days without Zack as he has spent the last 2 days in the mountains at Keystone with my sister.  He has done OK, but I am looking forward to having him home.  He returns on Thursday morning and then he heads out to "Camp Comfort" on Friday afternoon.  I then have another 48 hours without him.  Wow!  I don't know that I have had this kind of freedom in years!!

I hope everyone is having a great week and is looking forward to the weekend ahead.

Thanks and peace to all!