The New Normal

The new normal.  I really wish I had a nickel for every time I have heard that over the past year.  I haven't traditionally talked about much besides craftiness, but I feel the need to today.  My family was rolling along at our status quo, when my husband got the dreaded news in October of 2016 that he had stage 4 metastatic colon cancer.

Along the way, he himself talked about our new normal, dealing with chemo, doctors appointments, emergency surgery.  Each time trying to stay positive and adjust to the new normal.  I struggle with the commonly used phrase  "battling with cancer", because that implies if you don't survive you are a loser or that you didn't fight hard enough.  I know that my Bob fought as hard as he could for as long as he could.   One day in August 2017 the doctor's "there are many treatments to try" turned into "there's nothing else we can do" and we were told to go do what he wanted to do with the rest of his life.  Then the reality set in that he was too unwell to do what he wanted to do.  Then he slipped away from us in less than 2 weeks.  He passed before sunrise on September 2, 2017.  Bob had a deep relationship with Jesus, so I know he is in a better place and not suffering any more.

When you are married to someone for nearly 33 years, you get very used to being "we".  He even used to talk about "our" chemo or hospital stays as if I were getting treated too.  So now my new normal, I have to figure out how to be me.  I haven't been just me since the 1980s, I'm not sure how to do it.  It's scary to have to chose hot water heaters, furnaces, tires all by myself without someone to say they think I made the right choice.

I am still I guess going through the motions, mostly because I feel like he would be displeased if I let myself lay about crying, although he did like to make fun of me in my animal print pjs.  I wonder if I will ever stop thinking to myself "I'll have to tell Bob about that."  I'm really not sure I will, I still occasionally think that about my parents, and I did not live with them for the past 33 years and they have been dead for quite some time.

When my mom passed, it took me a long time to get back to crafting.  At some point I thought maybe I can craft my way out of this funk, and I  knit a scarf on a long train ride.  That did seem to help.  I think what I have right now is deeper than a funk, not sure what to name it, but I really need to make some clothes.  This will help, not just as a diversion because of the activity, but also right now so many clothes I put on hold associations, like memories of sleeping in a hospital room in that shirt or this is what I wore to his first day of chemo.

It's hard to distract yourself when you've lost your best friend- almost everything here is associated with him.  Even my yarns and fabrics were often bought on road trips we took together.  I plan to spend the next little while, sorting and organizing and sprucing up the house.  I  think a part of this process will be that I will try to finish up some works in progress.  To that end, I plan to join the 2018 UFO challenge over at Patchwork Times.   I will work on a list of my 12 UFOs for the challenge and try to rustle up some photos.