A lot has happened to me since this blog started and since the last entry I made. I am well as well as can be, but you’ll find out more as I intend to bring this blog back in the hopes that I can begin the newest chapter / chapters in my life, the chapters after nursing.

Two years ago, I came home to find him dead.

There’s no easy way to say that. And there’s no easy way to explain what it’s like to stand in the center of that moment—holding shock, heartbreak, and a strange sense of inevitability all at once.

He died by suicide.

And for most people, that’s where the grief begins.

For me, it was complicated.

Because long before his death, I had already started grieving the life we built—the version of him I fell in love with, and the version of me I lost trying to hold it all together.

The Truth of Our Last Years

Addiction took him in slow, cruel pieces.

The man I met and loved changed.

He became someone angry. Unpredictable. Controlling. Sometimes cruel.

I stayed too long.

And when I finally made the decision to leave—it was too late.

There are no clean emotions in this story. There’s no simple grief here.

I don’t cry because I lost him.

I cry because I almost lost myself.

Rediscovering Who I Was Before Him

After the 911 call, after the police, after the phone calls, the memorial services, and then the silence—there was me. Just me. And I didn’t know what that meant anymore.

I didn’t know what I liked to eat when no one was criticizing me.

I didn’t know how I talked when I wasn’t trying to stay safe.

I didn’t know how exhausted I had been, for so long.

Grief didn’t hit me like a wave.

It came as stillness.

An eerie, aching quiet.

And under that quiet, a question:

Now what?

Now, I Begin Again. I began what many friends and family members called Purge cleaning. I deep cleaned a lot of the house within the first two weeks to the point that most anything that was specifically his was either donated or tossed. I painted all the rooms in the house. Repaired floors and changed carpet. Made years worth of needed repairs all within the first two to three months.

I watched all the movies that he hated. I stopped watching broadcast television and most of all I stopped watching King of the Hill and Bob’s Burgers every fucking night. In fact I’ve not seen either of those shows since

I took naps without guilt. I sat in cafés and didn’t check my phone, because there was no one to account to anymore. I had to get used to not always feeling like I had to rush home.

I stopped explaining myself.

I stopped apologizing for taking up space.

And slowly, I met myself again.

Not the person I was before him—I’ll never be that man again.

But someone else.

Someone healing.

Someone real.

This Isn’t About Missing Him

I don’t miss him. That’s hard to admit, but it’s true.

What I miss is who I was before fear became normal.

I miss the version of me who felt free to laugh, who wasn’t second-guessing everything, who didn’t think survival was the same thing as love.

But now I’m remembering. I’m rebuilding.

And that? That’s a kind of grief, too.

But it’s also a kind of freedom.

I survived a lot.

Now I want to do more than survive.

Now I want to live.

Remember be the kind of person that your dog and your mother hope you are.