About me.

I feel like I was plucked out of my happy little beach life and plopped into an alternate universe. I’m truly living an alternate reality now, so different from the 30 years of life my husband and I built together. We were best friends and soul mates.

We moved to a beach town in our 20’s to escape the cold and snow of the north. Our family thought we were crazy. But we built an amazing life together and we were happy. We started a home based business and worked side by side for twenty years. We never had kids, but we did everything together – work, errands, meals, dates every week, little romantic getaways. We were partners in every sense of the word. Friends described us as “peas and carrots – you never see one without the other”.

And then one night, we said “I love you, goodnight”, as we always did, but he never woke up.

I found him in the middle of the night when I got up to use the bathroom. At some point he had gotten up during the night, and I didn’t hear him. He went and sat on the living room couch. And that’s where I found him, looking just like he was sleeping, but he had been gone for hours. He had a heart attack in his sleep. That’s where my nightmare started.

I’ve been trying to process the shock, trauma and grief ever since. Journaling has helped, and I finally decided to put my journal entries into a blog, in hopes that someone else going through the depths of grieving, won’t feel so alone.

I’m in my 50’s. I feel too old to start over, but too young to be alone for the rest of my life. It was never on our radar screen that one of us could die in middle age. Sure, we heard stories of other people having heart attacks or having bypass surgery, but we lived a healthy lifestyle. We had put a few pounds on in middle age, but we weren’t obese by any means. We were fairly active. We ate healthy meals consisting of whole foods, cooking everything from scratch. We never ate fast food. We ate out once a week on date nights. We had a moderate lifestyle. We didn’t smoke, we didn’t do drugs, we might have one drink a week. We lived our life in moderation and didn’t do anything stupid. And that was by design. Our whole goal was to be healthy so we could retire and have fun and live a long, happy, healthy life together. We always talked about our retirement plans and how much fun it was going to be. We never thought this could happen to us. Ever.

I’m left with a million questions in addition to my shock, grief and trauma. This is my journey to healing and I’m still in the middle of it. My reason for sharing this is to help others who might feel utterly alone in their grief, that no one understands, or are asking themselves if what they are feeling is “normal”.

You’re not alone. There is no time limit on your grieving process. And the thoughts that enter your mind during this time of grief may be so erratic that they shock you. It’s all normal. You’re normal and you will survive this. You will heal. After going through something like this, you become a completely different person now and it sucks. I feel like my very DNA has changed. I didn’t want to change and it’s probably safe to say you didn’t want to either. But we’re being forced to change. So, since we don’t have a choice in the matter, let’s choose to heal and get to a point where our Test can be our Testimony that we use to help others.