Exhausted

The days are long when you wake at 5 am especially when you go to sleep at midnight. This has been my schedule off and on since Steve died. It seems a blessing when I can go back to sleep until 7 or 8. But most mornings, I wake up before the sun and lay in bed thinking, thinking, thinking and all too conscious that I am alone in the bed. Finally, I have no choice but to get up and go downstairs, hoping the New York Times will have been delivered and I can make my smoothie and start the real day.

Everyone says I’m doing great but I’m not exactly sure what they mean by that. I have no training or experience in this role. I never watched my mom go through this. I just keep having these weird, almost out of body experiences. Like this morning when I met Joan to go through the documents in Steve’s safe deposit box. We sat together in the tiny room and I made small talk with the bank officer but inside I get saying to myself, “What the hell am I doing here?” Then when we were through, I went off to buy a new pair of glasses—business as usual, in other words.