Weird Widow Milestones

I crossed a bit of a milestone last month. June 7th marked the day that Bryan will have been gone for the same amount of time that I was with him when he was alive. It’s a weird milestone. I’m not even sure how healthy it was to have even acknowledged that date, but that’s the quirkiness of grieving. We get attached to weird momentos and odd dates.

So much has happened since he’s been gone. It’s almost a completely different world. It feels like he’s been gone forever, but at the same time, it doesn’t. I still have days where I miss him terribly even though I very rarely have days now where it hurts so badly that I can’t breathe. I catch myself wishing he were here to share the funny jokes I hear, the hilarious TikTok videos (TikTok wasn’t even a thing for us then), and my own milestones.

I’m stuck with this crazy date that I marked on my calendar and I’m trying to figure out what to do with it. It occurred to me that it could be seen as a date where I could move on, but that would mean leaving him behind and I could never do that. He’s always with me. Then I thought it could mark a time for a shift, but I feel like I’ve been shifting for the last year. I’ve changed so much since he’s been gone that I feel like I’m a different person than I was when I was Bryan’s wife.

Then tonight, I realized what it truly marks. Absolutely nothing. There’s nothing significant about that date other than it’s another day in my life. It’s another day without Bryan and another day where I’ve found the strength to get through it all. Finding that strength gets easier day by day. I think he would have been proud of me for that.