Time

I’ve always thought of time as circular instead of linear. More like a spiral or a metal spring that continually circles around and stretches on forever.  We repeat the same hours everyday, the same days every week, the same weeks every month, the same months every year and on and on. We cycle through the seasons.  The moon revolves around the earth and the earth around the sun. Everything we use to track time is circular.

But time is linear.  And now all I can think about is a never-ending path in front of me. While behind me, all I see is a huge black mark, like a scar on the day Kris died.  

My sense of time has been off since that day.  It’s like I wake up at 6am and then it’s 10am and then it’s 3pm and then it’s 7pm and then it’s bedtime.  At first I was staying up as late as I could so that I’d just pass out from exhaustion (and wine).  And then I started falling asleep watching tv and would just crawl straight from the couch to bed.

One of the hardest days has been the Monday after the funeral.  It was the first day I had been alone in a long time. And I needed to be alone.  But Maddie kept looking at me with sad, puppy dog eyes, like she finally realized that Kris wasn’t coming back.  And I couldn’t handle it. How do you explain to your dog that her “dad” is gone?

Maddie was very spoiled with Kris working from home. She has separation anxiety whenever we leave her behind.  She just wants to be with us all the time, but it’s been worse lately. She cries every time I leave her, and it’s so sad. I let her sleep in bed with me.

I’ve been trying to get back into a routine.  I went back to work last week. The first day back at work was really hard.  I’m only working part-time. I was very lucky that Kris made enough money that I didn’t have to work full-time.  I had just launched my private practice business in January, about five weeks before Kris died. It took me a few years to build up the courage to start a private practice.  I can be a risk taker, but I’m a very calculated risk taker and tend to overthink things.

I started working out again at Arbor CrossFit.  It feels good to exercise, to do something normal.  I’ve also been doing 50 burpees a day since March 28th.  Kris and I started doing 50 burpees a day in December and then we kept doing them and decided to do 50 burpees a day for a year.  Completely crazy, I know! Kris made a shared Google Sheets document for us to record our burpee times. The last day he recorded his time was February 26th, which was 89 days in a row.  I’m pretty sure he did his burpees on February 27th because he had been doing them in the morning before he went to work. At least I’d like to think that he got 90 days in row.

Thank you to everyone who is doing #50burpeesforKris for the month of April.  It means so much!

Some days are better than others.  I cry every day. Sometimes a memory hits me out of nowhere, and I completely lose it.  Some nights I wake myself up crying. And some days are okay. “How are you?” has to be the most common greeting, a completely innocent question but one that’s so hard to answer.  I’ve been responding with “I’m okay” or “I’m alright” or “I’m here”. I can’t say that I’m good.  I know that eventually I will be okay though.

But it takes time.

And I am going to start posting recipes again this month at some point.  Although, I don’t think I’ll be able to write about food without writing about Kris too.