Thinking

I’ve been thinking a lot about detours and why I decided to call my blog “sudden detour.”  This is tied up with how I’ve begun to think about my life without my love and best friend.

Doug died at 2:51 a.m. My God daughter was by my side and we stayed at the hospital until about 3:30.  We were both exhausted.  When we got in the car to drive home, I remember distinctly telling her “well, my life is effectively over.”  I sincerely felt that way then and still feel that way from time to time.  Certainly the life I had.  The life I had with a full time cheerleader, a fun companion. a confidant, a partner,  a love.  Over.  What am I going to do with the next (perhaps) 20+ years?   It was a desolate feeling then and remains so now.

I began, over the past month or so, to re-frame things.  I began to think of my life as a journey and this as a big detour from the journey I had planned.  Much like our trip to Oregon that I wrote about in the first post.  That detour took us into some beautiful country in Oregon that we wouldn’t have seen without having taken the wrong path.

Who am I now?  Who do I want to be and what do I want my life to look like?  I realized that I had a choice, unique perhaps to someone my age.  The choice to regroup and reform my life in a new way.  I don’t like it.  I don’t really want to do it.  I don’t want to think about where to go and I don’t want to work that hard.  But, I have no choice.  It’s either do the work or be miserable and as much as the work is hard, being miserable is harder.

I really like what reader Karen said in her comment regarding detours:  “They can take us down the wrong path, or set us back on track, sometimes they open up new possibilities.”  I want to explore those possibilities while remembering Doug and our life together.