"It's the end of the world as we know it..."

"It's the end of the world as we know it..."

Well, it's been a month already.  I can't really believe it, that I've been a widow for a month.  It feels like just yesterday, but also a lifetime ago. I went back to work this past weekend, so we're finally moving on in some ways, getting out of this phase of just waiting around.  There still a lot to get done in terms of paperwork and such, but it is nice to get back into our routine.  I'm not sure yet about the actual working part of it, I love my job but it leaves me with A LOT of time in my own head, and that's not always a good thing.

Wanting to get away from it all, I read a couple of books, but they maybe weren't the best choices.  Normally, subject matter doesn't affect me at all, I can usually read about any subject.  Now, obviously, I wasn't going to pick up a book about loss, or grief, or something like that.  But the two books I read ended up affecting me like I would not have thought they would. I read Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker and Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel.  Both of these book are post apocalyptic in nature, but unlike The Hunger Games or Divergent, these two books tell the end of the world as it's happening, one with a virus that kills 99.9% of mankind, and the other with the slowing of the earths rotation.  Normally, they wouldn't even have made me think twice about life, since obviously life moves on as normal.  For most people.  For me, it really has been the end of the world as I know it.  So many things remain the same, dinner at moms, and going to the park. Going to the gym, and church, and grocery shopping.  But it's also completely different.  I'm learning how to navigate in this completely alien world.

I'm all alone, in so many ways that I'm not used to any more.  Bedtime and birthday parties, not being able to just run to the store and leave the boys with Dave.  I have to worry about everything now, when before Dave took care of everything.  I was very lucky in that aspect, but now I have all the bills and insurance and stuff to worry about.  I feel like I'm the stranger in my own world sometimes. While in the middle of these books, Station Eleven especially, I was starting to get the feeling like maybe I wasn't going to make it in this new world.  Of course I did and will continue to, but with the heaviness of the subject matter, it really made me feel like life was such a sure thing anymore.  Which of course it's not, I think Daves death has taught us all that for sure.  Which is all the more reason to keep on living, and getting up every day, and enjoying what we have, because you really don't know when it will all be taken away from you.  The entire landscape changed so you no longer recognize the world around you.  But even then, you take what you know and make the best of it.  You find the little things to live for, mine are my children, among other things.

We're surviving, for now.  But someday, it will be more than that I hope.  Because "Survival is insufficient."