Home:
Chris is. Home now, after four months traveling the world – his handsome body is there on the other side of the bed and the other side of the kitchen counter he eats his granola and he feel so good and strange and then achingly good again.

We will have been married eighteen years December 31st. My, my, feels like just yesterday we meet at film school, me with orange hair (accidental), him with geek glasses (still goregous.)

Trough:
I am. In one. Right now.

The waves of grief, for me, look like:
crests of ecstatic sorrow, crying that is cleansing, sparkling with a hyper-aliveness, the visceral awareness that I am still here and the sweetness of loss, of having loved someone.

The trough of the wave, now here, it is flat. I can’t see very far. The dark pressure of the water behind me, bearing down, and the water in front of me, needing to be climbed… It all feels too  boring and looming and dense. Blank.

Who knew crying would be the high point?

Marshalling trough self-care – yoga, massage, possible yoga retreat in January, Witness consciousness, talking about how dull I feel to Chris, salads, letting as much go as possible like Christmas decorating, present moment awareness: oh yes, even the trough is not fixed! Even the trough murmurs and shifts (bottle nosed dolphins dart below my feet).

Reading The Waves by Virginia Woolf.