By the time I began writing my six month update, I realized that I was only a few days away from the seven month marker. Time continues to be not real, unimportant, and hard to keep track of. It is however speeding up. The town of Page, Arizona has decorated for Christmas in a big way. Light up snowflakes and candy canes hang over the traffic lights. The trees are mostly bare now and wrapped with colorful lights- the only real indicator of December in the desert.

Answering the question, “How are you doing?” is beyond complicated. For the most part I have learned how to function in daily life with deep sadness and underlying anxiety.

When people ask how I’m doing, I freeze, because I don’t know what information to give. Do you want the milestone updates, do you have an hour to talk or five minutes? Writing it down seems safest.

It took about three months to feel hungry after Ian died, and another three months to do anything about it. These days I eat pretty regularly, I cook, I still drink a liter of coffee, and food tastes again. Sleeping is hit or miss, nightmares are abundant, and I drink plenty of water. My basic needs are becoming less difficult to meet.

The pomegranate tree in my backyard has given all of it’s fruit and lost all of it’s leaves, looking like nothing more than a wimpy bush now. Mallow and I have developed a new routine. Our yard is full of red sand, not dirt. Every day Mallow gets the zoomies; she sprints around the yard and digs like a maniac, having the time of her life. Once her hole is somewhere around a foot or two deep, she lays in it. Then, when we go to bed I kick the sand back into the hole so she can do it all over again tomorrow. That’s love, baby. Or maybe Mallow thinks we’re at war.

Six months after Ian drowned, I was on a river trip. I paddled down the San Juan River in a Live Your Dreams canoe. You may be thinking, a river trip, really? Of all places to celebrate Ian’s life and mourn his death? Why yes, the river seemed to make the most sense.

I fell out of the Live Your Dreams canoe into the freezing cold water…twice.

It was the plunge I needed. All the rapids that I went through perfectly without hitting a rock, without accidentally doing a 360, without getting splashed, without flipping or sinking…I don’t remember any of those rapids.

It’s a metaphor, alright? When Ian died, I had to eddy out of the river of life. “Eddy out” is a term used to describe leaving the main current and entering an eddy, or a calm pool next to the current. I sat there for a long time, just watching the river of life float on past me. With no desire to jump back in until now.

When six months hit in Novemeber, I paddled back into the current both literally and metaphysically. The river welcomed me back in BIG way.

She said, “C’mon girlie, if you’re ready to join us you better full send into these waters, hold nothing back, and don’t be afraid.”

I was afraid though. I was afraid of falling in. Winter temperatures without a drysuit? Getting wet and flipping the canoe was the worst case scenario that I needed to avoid. The river had other ideas.

After hitting some trees and a rock or two, the canoe took on water and sank with me and Mike in it. I looked back at Mike and yelled, “Bail!” I threw the makeshift bail bucket that was a milk jug back to him, but it got caught in the wind and went downstream.

He thought I meant abandon the ship, but I meant use the bail bucket to get water out. When you’re sitting in a canoe with water up to your waist, the time to bail the water out has passed. We were sinking, we needed a rescue. Another canoe paddled over to us and brought us to shore.

There I was, on the other side of my worst fear, laughing my ass off.

I felt connected to Ian when I fell into the San Juan River. Not just because he died, drowned, and disintegrated into the West Mancos River which flows into the San Juan. To my surprise, I didn’t feel afraid when the boat was sinking. I didn’t think that I was going to die or drown. I felt connected to Ian’s lively spirit and that silly “oh, we’re fucked and it’s funny” energy. I could picture the way his eyes always lit up at the slightest sign of a misadventure. That same spark was stirring in me, awakening a playful side that had been dormant for the last half year.

So what do you do when your worst fear happens?

You get to shore, take off your rain boots and dump the water out. You unstrap the floating gear in your boat and your friends help you. Together, you take the boat, flip it over, dump the water out, strap the gear back on, and get back in the boat. You paddle downstream to camp, make a fire, drink some hot tea, change your clothes, and laugh some more about it.

The plunge into the river helped me loosen my grip on perfection. Maybe you don’t know this about me, but I love being perfect. I love being right, I want to be the smartest, I love having my shit together, I love knowing what to do and spitting wisdom and making the right choices. Essentially, I want to be the perfect griever who cries and feels all the feelings, who shares appropriately and checks in on others. The perfect griever who is brave, looks on the bright side, finds the meaning, applies it to my life and blossoms into a beautiful butterfly.

The river laughed in my face saying, “Yeah that’s great and all, but don’t you want to have a little fun?” Ian must’ve agreed with the river. I can hear the two of them giggling together as Ian said, “Swim her,” and River said, “My pleasure.”

So the next day, I fell into the river again. This time, with Elise in my boat because Mike said hell no to getting back in the canoe with me. This time, I rode in the back and steered the canoe through the rapids. I know how to read water pretty well, but I haven’t ever canoed a river with rapids like this before. I hit the fucking meat of the rapids, like you would in a raft. I didn’t steer us around the rapids like a canoe can do. We wore banana suits and navigated several rapids successfully. Our confidence was through the roof when our river team stopped to scout a rapid, supposedly the hardest biggest rapid of the trip.

Elise and I had no fear. We said, “We got this. This looks easy. Let’s go first.”

So we paddled into the rapid with confidence and made it through all the major obstacles. We paddle high fived and cheered and then hit a rock that I didn’t see. We took on water, we were sinking again. The river was narrow in this section, so I stepped out of the boat to pull us to shore safely.

I miscalculated.

Though the river looked ankle deep when I stepped into it, I was shocked to find myself swimming. I accidentally abandoned Elise on a sinking ship. Looking downstream, I saw her holding on to the boat that was completely underwater, with her legs kicked out behind her, gracefully floating downstream. Luckily some safety rafts were at the bottom of the rapid and rescued her.

Again, I laughed my ass off.

I dumped the water out of my boots, we flipped the boat, re-strapped our gear, and carried on down the river. Elise wasn’t mad, she was wearing a dry suit. I was wearing sweatpants but I wasn’t mad either. This was the day that we became best friends.

“Your sparkle is coming back!” Elise said. “You’re having fun!”

I teared up because she was right. I was having fun. And I felt this glimmer of myself waking up. The cold plunge energized me in a way that I hadn’t felt since Ian died. I felt less afraid of the river and back on more playful terms with the water. All hope of me going down this river perfectly was demolished, which of course translated into letting go of being the perfect griever.

I missed Ian greatly on this trip. He actually knows how to navigate a river in a canoe. He would be barking canoe commands at me from the back and we may have made it through the rapids without falling in.

I noticed on the trip how alone I felt without my dog, Mallow. It was also a nice break to not take care of anything other than myself. There were a lot of couples on the trip, who would say goodnight and leave the fire, but I knew they were just going back to their tent to giggle and cuddle because that’s what Ian and I would do if we were together. I missed my canoe buddy, my camping buddy, my partner, my best friend.

It was, however, palpable to notice how my loneliness was transforming.

One morning I took my cup of coffee for a walk and listened to the quiet. I sat on a rock in the sun and cried. The next morning I sat across the river from a great blue heron and we both watched each other for a long time. Another morning I watched a bald eagle circle over our camp as I wrote in my journal. On a hike, a raven moved from rock to rock watching me as I walked. Through the birds, I could feel that Ian was with us. The wilderness always reminds me how we are never alone, how we are always surrounded by life. My loneliness was transforming into moments of solitude that I could appreciate.

For the last six months I have been steadily forcing myself to go outside, telling myself that I should hike, that I should camp, that I should exercise. And I’m glad I did that for myself, but it wasn’t enjoyable. A notable transition occurred after that river trip. Instead of “shoulding” myself into things, I wanted to do them.

For the last month, I have wanted to spend more time outside because I notice how much happier I feel when I wake up under the sky. I have wanted to move to my body because I notice how energized I feel after a long walk. I notice how the thoughts in my brain slow down when I run instead of walk, so I’ve started to run again. I notice the pain in my body and instead of avoiding it, I want to stretch it out. I noticed that after a yoga session, I feel calmer.

It’s really nice when you get back in the flow of wanting to do things for yourself.

And through all these milestones and improvements, I continue to feel absolutely fucking sad. Of course I do. Of course I miss Ian every day. I think we all learn to carry our grief with us instead of it going away. Writing is a cathartic and healing way to process this grief that I am holding.

In the last month I’ve been writing like it’s my job. My capacity to sit down and write has grown. I can concentrate for longer, I can formulate my thoughts into sentences faster. I enjoy the process of writing, even though it feels like I am in the trenches. When I write, I cry a lot. It doesn’t necessarily feel good, but at least I feel something.

Sometimes I have no clue what to do with myself if I’m not writing. Sometimes it’s difficult to separate myself from the past character that is in my book. I am writing about the search for Ian and sometimes I get stuck in the brain of myself from seven months ago. Sometimes I still feel that person’s anger because I wrote about it. Sometimes I don’t recognize myself in the present moment, because everything about my life feel so new.

So I go to therapy and try to do yoga on YouTube. I go outside and look around at the red rock and I immerse myself in the canyon country that I love so much. I run and play with Mallow and I do my best to return to presence. I’m making friends in Page and growing my community here. I tell myself that I don’t need to perfect even though I really want to be. I think back to falling in the river and I laugh at myself, remembering how fun it feels to mess up.

I think about the communal grief that is happening in the world, both within our community who misses Ian and within the greater world of tragedy. War, mental illness, rising cost of living, climate crisis and uncertainty. I think about how we, as a society, cope with death and how we could be better at talking about it.

The river trip was magical because we got to grieve together as a community. We held on to each other and cried. We shared our feelings of regret, sadness, anxiety, confusion, and utter loss. We read poems about death to try to understand it more. We laughed and enjoyed the wilderness because that’s part of grieving too.

We told stories about Ian and painted around the fire to honor his absence. And when the river trip was over, I didn’t want to leave because the communal grief felt so real. It wasn’t hunky dory wonderful, it was intense and hard at times to feel such strong emotions in the presence of others and let myself be seen crying. But it was utterly authentic.

We need each other to grieve properly. I say this as someone who lives alone with hundreds of miles of wilderness spreading out around me. I say this as someone who spends most every day alone with her dog, writing in silence. I say this as someone who is grieving in solitude.

But my next two weeks of life will be full of people and love. My brothers and friends are coming to visit. I’ll get to show them this wonderful landscape that I love deeply. We’ll get to share meals together and laugh about stupid shit. We’ll poke fun of each other, go for walks, and they’ll probably ask how I’m doing and I won’t know what to say.

Other than thank you for being here, because sharing time together is the most precious thing on earth.

And I think about my time with Ian and how it was so full of love. How there’s nothing that I would change about our time together. That’s not a rose colored tint trite saying looking back, I mean it. We said “I love you” every day, we argued over silly things that come with living together in a van, we apologized, we moved on, we chased the hell out of our dreams and sometimes our dreams sucked in reality. We immersed ourselves in the backcountry and absorbed the lessons of the wilderness, which weren’t always kind. We watched each other grow through hard lessons. We danced in the kitchen and built a life together that we were excited about. Ian taught me how to love.

And now he’s teaching me that no matter how much time you get, no love seems long enough.

I don’t think any of us will ever feel like we have enough time with our loved ones. Maybe that’s the gritty truth, that no love seems long enough, even if you do get a lot of time to spend together and that time was really rich.

Maybe all we can do is try our best to appreciate the time we get, but know that it will never feel like enough. And maybe that’s okay, because maybe that’s what love is. It’s infinite, when our bodies are mortal and fragile and constrained to a time limit.

Maybe that’s the heartbreaking reality of loving people. Maybe no matter what happens, we’ll always wish for more time together.

So, in this season of grief…that’s how I’m doing.

Thanks for reading and for all the support and love that has come my way.

---

Enjoy reading these posts? Join my email list! Get an email every time I publish a new post.