Half a year

It's six months.  Half a year.  13 June was six months ago.

I find I don't really know what to say about that after all.  My life has changed so many times since that day, after having changed so many times in the months leading up to that day.  Yeah, I know: life is change.  This year has certainly been lively, then.

I just don't even know what to say.  Jerry's been dead for half a year.  It's just unbelievable, "inconceivable!" as he'd say, quoting The Princess Bride, one of his favorite movies.  I'm writing about Jerry being dead and I'm smiling, remembering the way he'd say that, "Inconceivable!"  I'm just so baffled by myself these days: I just seem to be way ahead of schedule in so many ways.  I was sure I wouldn't be able to smile at memories of Jerry for a long time, and yet here I am, at "six months out," as the widowed say, and I'm smiling.  Who am I?  Why am I coping?  Why do things seem to be getting better?  Are they really?  Is it all going to come crashing down?  Is it all an illusion?

I did shed a few tears this morning.  It's not all sunshine and daisies and Cam Newton all the time.  But it is sunshine and daisies and Cam Newton for far more of the time than I thought would be possible at this point in my journey.  Is it the Prozac?  Is it the Prozac, too, that's got me waking up every single night between 3 and 4 a.m. and lying there unable to go back to sleep for what feels like forever?  I can't remember the last really good night's sleep I've had.  It's still worth the tradeoff if it's the Prozac that's responsible for a lot of how well I seem to be doing.  I hope it's not just the Prozac, though.  I really want to be doing this well for reals, as the kids say.

My parents were here for a visit this past weekend, and they got an up-close-and-personal look at what a new convert to Auburn football is like (and I'm still walking around free, so they must have taken it all okay... even after I had us watching the entire long drawn-out Heisman ceremony coverage on ESPN Saturday evening). Yesterday we went to a sing-along Messiah in the next town northwest of here, my third time doing a sing-along Messiah (first was at Lincoln Center when I lived on 73rd Street in the late 1990s, second was when Jerry and I went to the same little one as yesterday, I don't remember what year).  This year I was struggling with remnants of the laryngitis I had in Alabama - my speaking voice is back, but my singing voice is still iffy, but through a combination of 1) sage advice not to sing at all in the days leading up to the sing-along and 2) Cepacol lozenges, I was able to sing... but I have vowed that next time I do that I will know all the alto parts of all the choruses (even the ones they skip!), and not have to guess at half of them!

I'm doing okay.  I think this is the conclusion I'm drawing at six months out.  I didn't expect to be.  But I am.  I can't help but be afraid that it will all disappear and I'll be back in the black nightmare of the summer and early fall, which I'm really in anyway but just don't realize it.  But meanwhile I'm... doing okay.  I posted on Facebook today that I think Jerry would be proud of how I'm doing in a world without him in it.  And I think he would be.  He'd be amazed that I now have an idea where Touhy and Mannheim are, that I'm driving on I-90 every weekday, that I've driven by myself twice to and from Alabama now, that I'll be moving there someday.  That I'm making plans.  That I've survived.  That I want to survive, and do more than survive.  That I want my life to be worth living, that I already feel like it is.

I'm not without guilt at feeling better.  Not at all.  I even feel sad that I feel better, as crazy as that may sound - that I'm going on living and feeling better without Jerry here, after witnessing Jerry suffer so horribly, after watching my sweet honey die.  I never imagined "better" would be a word that would in any way apply to me, ever.  It does, now.  And how is that possible?  I must be a hell of a lot more resilient than I ever imagined.  I don't feel resilient.  But I'm still here.  And still moving forward.  And finding who I am again outside of the wrecked shell in that photo I posted on 21 June.  I'm not that person anymore.  I'm grateful not to be that person anymore.  And I have a sneaking suspicion that having lived with Jerry for 11 years, having been his wife for 10 years, having been loved by him and loving him, have been hugely responsible for making me the person who can now see herself with a future.  It occurred to me the other day that no matter how bad I might ever end up feeling about myself - and I think most of us have moments when we're not so fond of aspects of ourselves - no matter how down on myself I might get, I need only remember that Jerry Enright loved me - and that being so, there must be something worthwhile and basically okay about me.  Because Jerry Enright was an incredibly special, especially worthwhile person.  And his love was something I'll treasure for as long as I live.

And those are the thoughts I bring to the half-year mark.