By request

Alicia's "Something I Wore" entry was about her engagement and wedding rings, and in response to it I originally had a long comment that turned into its own blog entry, before I decided that wasn't the place for it.  She kindly asked me to reconstruct it, so here's an approximation - variation on the theme of her "Something I Wore" post:

Jerry almost never took off his wedding ring.  At some point during his final hospitalization, he had to take it off for a procedure - MRI or something - and I took it from him and put it on my finger, next to my own wedding ring.  It felt bad - it felt like an omen of things to come - and as soon as he was out of the procedure, I put it back on his finger again.

A few weeks or days later, I can't remember how long, Jerry's son and daughter and I sat by the hideous hospice bed in our bedroom, with what was left of Jerry lying there, the body that hardly even looked like him anymore, getting colder and colder.  It was our last few minutes, as the night got later and later, before we left the body to be readied by the hospice nurse for the arrival of the people from the funeral home.  And I realized his wedding ring was still on his finger, and his son took it off and handed it to me, and I put it on the chain around my neck that had the Battlestar Galactica his 'n' hers personalized dogtags on it (Jerry never wore his - not being anywhere near as geeky as his wife - but he was remarkably tolerant of geekiness, and even spent a fun early morning with me at a Buffy the Vampire Slayer midnight singalong at a theater in Chicago).

This blog probably tells when I took my own wedding ring off, when I stopped wearing the chain with the rings on it, but I can't remember.  For a long time, I kept the BSG tags in the urn his son made, too, along with other mementos we put into it after we'd scattered Jerry's ashes in Alabama.  I felt something like all or nothing: I had to move on, I couldn't hang on to something that was no longer true: that I was married, that I had a husband.  I have nothing against widowed people who consider themselves married forever, even after death has parted them from their spouses, but at some point I realized I didn't feel married anymore - I felt widowed, and for me, those two things are in no way the same.  Then again, as I've mentioned before, I'm also someone who doesn't believe my sweetie is somewhere "watching over me," sending me messages through coincidental songs on the car radio, waiting for me to join him somewhere, etc. etc. etc.  He died.  He's dead.  To me, that's the reality.

Anyway: today I put the chain with the BSG tags back around my neck.  Last weekend my therapist shared with me that in the past she had experienced the loss of a partner too, and that she still, to this day,  does little things that remind her of him.  I haven't been trying to block Jerry out, God knows, but I felt like I couldn't do certain things either, like wear my wedding ring - that that would be a lie to myself.  I still feel like that about the wedding ring - but I'm thinking I need to relax some of the things I find myself doing to try to stave off pain, since they're clearly not doing the trick, and bringing out the silly dogtags again is the abandonment of one of those things.  Because yes, he's dead, he's lost to me, but he will always be who he was, the love of my life, and I can allow myself to hang on to that without keeping myself from moving forward.  At least, I'm going to try.  And if someday there were to be another love of my life?  It wouldn't negate anything about how I felt and feel about Jerry.

I have a feeling the above is a total muddle, but that's my life these days: a muddle.  So it's apt.

And by the way: