I use different routes these days...

March 19, 2007

The strangest things happen occasionally. I'll start to drive down a familiar street and realize that the last time I drove down this street Tim was in the car with me. Then I can't make myself continue down that street. I'll turn off somewhere, go a different route, even if my destination is one where Tim and I had been numerous times. There's just something about remembering that last drive on this street, this block, that gets to me.

The first time I went to buy groceries was like that. It was very hard. I no longer had to purchase certain things that Tim liked, that I previously bought just for him. My shopping list was much shorter, truncated, just as I felt my heart was. Pushing my cart down certain aisles became nearly impossible and I just didn't buy some things that day.

Last night as I drove home from my small group meeting I deliberately went the long way around, just so I wouldn't feel that same horrible aloneness when there should have been the two of us in the car.

For a similar reason I no longer use the front door to my condo much. I could, but now I park the car near the side door that Tim and I never used together because it has a step. I don't need the handicap parking space close to the front door so I just park near the side door. Entering the condo this way doesn't trigger fresh memories of the last time Tim and I went in or out of our condo together, and that way it doesn't trigger fresh pain.

Strange, the things I do to keep that pain at bay, the pain of Tim not accompanying me when I leave the house. Even though I went many places, many times, by myself in the past, it's those times we went in and out together that are still too fresh, too tender in my mind.

I know Tim can experience my comings and goings along with me, and he can see where we're going now where he couldn't before. Sometimes the Lord lets me hear Tim's reaction to seeing the inside of a place we'd been but he'd never seen, like Lowe's, or the Mall — cluttered. Jumbled. Noisy he knew, but splashy, junky, cluttered he didn't know. I was never that good at describing all the stuff you find in places like that. His reaction to those places is funny, really, like a kid sometimes turning up his nose at spinach, yuk - why on earth do you want to shop here, I can almost hear him say. Well, I'm used to the junkiness, I don't even think about it, I tell him.

It's just that his physical presence was so much a part of my life. It's something I want back! But not want back too, if it meant Tim wouldn't be well and whole and able to see and do everything he can see and do in heaven these days.

I know one day this hurtful aloneness feeling will be gone. It just comes over me sometimes and I use whatever means I need to get past it.