Save a couple of short weekend trips, I have now been at home in Portland since June 3rd, 2022, which I guess is almost eight weeks and smashes my previous four-week record. Before that it's the longest I've stayed put since the end of summer of 2021, when Josha and I were in the final stages of packing for what would be our last trip together as earthly beings.

*

My house was built in 1912, which is the same year the Titanic launched and the Oreo cookie was created. Auspicious! My friend says that my house "announces itself" as people walk across the old, creaky floors, and I have always loved that thought. When Josha and I first found this place I knew he wanted it before we saw it - it was *just* outside of our budget and you have never met a man more determined to have the finest for himself than my sweet Treasure was. Once we set foot on the enormous front porch he was apoplectic with joy - I recall there may have been a sort of flappy-hand motion, very uncharacteristic. Once he saw the box beam ceilings inside ("the same style Obama has in the White House!" our realtor said) I knew it was all over. Damn, this place looked fancy.

Before we moved in I was living my Golden-Girls best life in a one bedroom condo on North Waterfront, built in the nineties and full of modern luxuries and silence, and a pool. I thought buying a musty old pile of wood was the worst thing I had ever done, and it took me six weeks to be able to sleep upstairs. For the first several months living here - our first house - we spent our evenings wandering around marveling at all the old-ness of it all, daydreaming about what we might change if we ever had money again. 

Joshie bear loved this place. I don't think he would have ever left. Even though we sometimes talked about moving out of the city or trying to find more property, I knew this was probably his forever home. It didn't feel like that to me and it scared me. What would that mean for us? Did we want different things? I dreaded another existential/geographic collapse in our relationship. We fought about the house a lot - me always wanting to change walls - "blow it out!" - and him firmly attached to the exact and present form of our ancient, rickety home. 

The night he died I had two urgent requests for Tara, Krista and Josha's dad, Mark. The first was to nuke Italy and blow it off the earth. The second was to burn down my house and everything in it so I'd never have to look at it again.

My neighbor told me later, "I'm so glad you didn't burn the house down!" and I said, "yeah, it's nice to still have all his smelly clothes," and my neighbor said, "no...we're glad for our safety". The thought hadn't even occurred to me and we laughed. He said nothing about nuking Italy. 

I haven't spent much time here since getting home from Portofino because its big and scary and loud but also because it's so fucking sad. There are too many corners hiding things I don't always want to remember. There's the little spot in the kitchen where we would dance late at night after a dinner out. There's his spot on the front porch where he would wait for me to get home, strumming his guitar, his face sunlit through the wisteria. There's the rose bush he bought after some yard work destroyed the previous one that had been there for at least fifty years. There's his hideous leather recliner that I hate to this day. There's his drawer (he only got one) in the bathroom. There are his flip flops and there's where he takes them off. There's the floor we slept on when the power and AC went out. There's the tree he loved to look up at from his hammock below. 

It was late this June and my neighbor emailed me about picking the raspberries that grow between our two houses. I had forgotten about the raspberries. I went out the next morning and spent hours climbing in and out of the vines, eventually covered in bloody scratches, dead spiders and streaks of berry juice. Josha planted strawberries last summer and I collected our first harvest. They were all just at the edge of being too ripe and they turned to mush when I washed them. The freezer was still full of food people had sent after the memorial, because his dad won't let me throw away expired food, like seriously ZERO food wasted, so it all ends up in the freezer until he leaves. I spent a cathartic hour purging before I got to the bottom shelf, where there was a crispy old Ziplock full of frost-bitten raspberries, with a date written in black sharpie : 6/28/21. 

I flung the bag to the floor and stared at it. I stared at that bag until the icy layer on its outside disappeared and the sunlight dimmed and my heart thumped so hard I was sure you could see it from outside me. A flashback started - early-morning summer light, Josha's jorts, laughing and stealing bounty from each others bowls, a warm spoon cake with ice cream, him smiling. Back staring at the bag, I put on some very dramatic dish gloves and marched out to the trash. I threw the bag in, saying out-loud, "you're fine! You are FINE! Totally fine! Fine, fine, fine!" in what I imagine was an alarming-for-my-neighbors moment of Tabitha theatrics, and walked back inside. 

I wrote the date out on the new container, all the while crying and giving myself a weird, maniacal pep talk. 

I really did feel FINE for the first few hours after but whatever sorcery occurred between the bushes and the freezer bag kicked off a week and a half of depression. It was a very bad one and it's only recently that I got out of it. I won't tell you what the inside of those depressions look like because you probably already know: it's just dark.

I was talking to Tara at some point after the raspberry incident and she was giving me her often delivered yet always soothing "year of firsts" talk. I think she must have read this on some widow support blog and she keeps adding more elaborate vocabulary to it. She told me that its a "season of firsts" - a season! I loved that - and to give myself grace, and then I think one of us repeated Morgan's mantra, "it's just the next hard thing." Whatever Tara said, I felt better afterward, at least for a while. 

I started reflecting on the idea of a year of firsts. Naturally I took it way too far and was thinking of things like the first caper I ate since Josha died, or the first bruise I got from bumping in to furniture, or the first time I ran out of scotch tape and had to buy more. Overly detailed stuff like that. I spent a week or two reflecting on this and ultimately felt very little comfort as the thought of all the other esoteric firsts - bathroom emergency, a burned out lightbulb, the mineral smell of fall rain - snowballed me into bed. It was just too much. 

After our talk I was thinking about Tara and her first birthday since Josha died. It was a very, very bad day. So was Morgan's, I remembered. So was Vanessa's and Jeremiah's. So will mine be.

I decided that I will, in my predictable way, break the mold. This widow will instead conduct a year of seconds, and this allowance is hereby granted to you and everyone you know. The first of all the things is the worst of the worst, so you should at least get a mandatory redo amirite?

Those are now my plans for the remainder of this god fucking awful bitch asshole of a year: it's all terrible firsts and let's just get it over with.

My house is now some days a slap but most days a hug. Grief is, apparently, a journey that happens on its own timeline.

Which brings me to the long slow march.

*

I learned of my dad's disappearance on June 13, 1999. He had been missing since May 31st and his mom, my grandma Nan, called me after I had been unsuccessfully trying to reach him for two weeks and told me he was gone. At that time I don't think any of us thought he was GONE gone, just disturbingly and terrifyingly gone, but surely not permanently gone.

By June of the following yearI had a very different looking life and had given up only a little hope that he would be back, and was struggling with my first true depression. Incidentally that was the summer I decided to read Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar as an annual, hot weather thing, and boy was that a bad idea. 

That summer was a lot of listless, sleepless days and nights, a lot of sleep-deprived manic rants to friends, and even though it was warm it never seemed like daytime. I had no idea what was wrong with me and being 19 or 20 years old I had no idea what the fuck to do. My mom's doctor put me on Zoloft courtesy of some free samples he had and I found a therapist somehow (I can't even imagine how because I was uninsured and broke), and that was the first time I heard that anniversaries are really difficult when you're in trauma or grief. I subsequently got the even better news that I would probably struggle at this time of year for a very long time. FINE! 

For all the years since, on or off meds, good times and bad, I get a little gloomy in June. I've found ways to cope and its less difficult each year. I have definitely stopped reading the fucking Bell Jar in summer and probably for always, but anyway.

The anniversary of dad's disappearance passed this year and I had no idea. I finally remembered a couple of weeks later and had a grim laughing fit. The loss of my dad has always been the most painful thing in my life, or at least it was, until September 20, 2021. My beloved, best friend, twinkly eyed partner in crime dad, now puny and forgettable in the face of a GONE-gone Josha. I don't know, I guess it was funny at the time. 

*

So here I am now in my backyard, sweating bullets in 100 degree heat, alone and at home for nearly eight weeks, uncomfortable being inside in the silence and dreading all my days until September 21, 2022. My therapist told me to find ways to take care of myself and I told her I didn't know what that meant, and she asked, what gives you release? And I said:

-walking around the house in dramatic robes, wailing
-wandering the house room from room, crying and flinging a martini around in all my tortured zeal
-carting Josha's urn with me everywhere I go

I said to her, Jesus Christ that sounds terrible. And she said, well, when you imagine doing it, does it feel good? I said, yes.

She said well, maybe that's what you need to do.

*

I did end up moving Joshie's urn to a new spot and redoing his accompaniments. He now has three candles - one of Dolly Parton, Tom Petty and Stevie Knicks - a guitar pic, a poker chip from a tournament he won in Vegas and a strip of black and white pictures of the two of us looking really happy. He likes his new spot because he can see out onto the front porch, even to the spot he used to sit to serenade my walk up from the street. I haven't spent much time wandering the house sobbing, though I have created some dramatic outfits, and I haven't thrown a martini or anything else in anguish except an old Dr. Pepper soda can box (no one was hurt).

A colleague and I were talking last week, he having lost his wife at 33, and he said, "eventually there will be more good days than bad," and it was so earnest and hopeful that I felt bad telling him it was bullshit. We were both crying.

I looked at him as I thought about the really bad days of October or November 2021, or April or May 2022. I tallied up the balance and what do you know?

Apparently some of that bullshit is true.

There are undoubtedly more good days than bad when averaged out by month and categorically factored, which yes, I did need to do. And there are probably more firsts than non-firsts left, unfortunately. I mean, I don't think I've even tasted mustard since he died so I still have an entire library of condiments to get through, please keep that in mind.

Yet when I look at the whole, disastrous picture, the bads are not AS bad, are they? No. If I am being totally objective and clinical, they are definitely not as bad. The goods are happening more.

Those goods aren't great but they are popping up unexpectedly here and there, like on this blistering hot Monday as I sit watching the rest of the old raspberries whither and think about what excitement tomorrow might bring.

No, the goods aren't great, but they are fine.

FINE, FINE, FINE.