but it's my life

The nights... I don't think it's any big suprise to anyone that after losing your best buddy and bunkie that the nights are long and hard.

I have avoided posting this but decided that it is another part of learning to cope and must be included for this to be a truthful blog for others to learn from.

I avoided changing the sheets for weeks after the mate died. I needed the comfort it gave me to be just exactly where we were last happy and loving with each other. I needed the pheremones in his pillow to calm my spirit and let me sleep, pretending that pillow was him nestled beside me. I needed the room to look and smell the same when I walked into it. Just the one change, him never joining me there again, was all I could handle for 39 days.

I ran the vac, washed the rugs and changed the sheets this weekend. I checked with a friend and I am just fine, she wouldn't even enter their bedroom for weeks after her mate died. For another friend, the house stayed exactly the same for most of two years. You do what you must to comfort yourself and survive.

But I am finding I can't go to bed until I am exausted now. I do chores, I write the bills, I do the paperwork, I play cards online till everyone else is gone, I pet the dogs, I make the coffee for morning, I take a shower, and then I make hot coco and buttered toast and I still am not able to face the bed. So I read till my head drops to the table. Or I play my gutiar. Or I look up obscure things on the net...or I read your blogs. Anything but sleep.

Yesterday it caught up with me. I took an allergy pill and fell asleep at my desk so deeply that I don't even know if anyone caught me. When I woke up I realized I had to get this under control or I would be totally backwards in my sleeping patterns.

Tonight I will try watching a movie and sleeping in the recliner or on the couch if that is what I have to do. I am not going to be independently wealthy anytime soon and I have to work. That means I have to be awake days. That means I have to sleep nights.

And it used to be, when I got caught up in a project or a game, that the mate would chivvy me into going to bed by threatening to be asleep when I got there, no good night kiss for me! But that's no threat now.

So 41 one days later, still not a tearless day and the bed has gotten too empty for me, inspite of my best intentions to remember the mate loved me so much it has to feel like that now.