OK so this is going to be super long, but maybe I'll put a picture, but it might be sad, I don't know, OK I'll shut up and write.

Tuesday finally happened. You probably knew that. Maybe you were even there.

I buried my future that day. I buried my dreams, my children, my happiness, my direction. I buried him. Our favorite character of this blog, Reboyfriend. I put him in the ground and drove away. So I start over now. I guess.
 

That's all anything is right now. I have no idea where I will live after I finish this bereavement asylum with family, in which I sleep on a mattress on the floor of my little cousin's bedroom, just because I can't sleep alone. I tried going back to the home we shared, just to get some clothes. It destroyed me. It reduced me to nothingness. I don't know if I can ever go back. I can't ever feel like that again.

I cry and cry. My face scrunches up.

Reboyfriend's funeral was a triple-funeral with his dad and brother. It was a closed casket service. I'm glad the remains were found - often planes go down over water or suffer conditions that leave nothing to bring back. But I'm sad I will never get the kind of closure everyone needs in these situations. Am I glad I was protected from the sight? Yes. Am I glad he didn't suffer? Of course. I would suffer anything for him. I am right now, aren't I?

When you are told that you will never, ever have mortal contact with your partner again, you decide it is time to do some things. You "decide." Like you're being rational or something. Like tearing through all the laundry in that house, heaving like a banshee just to find a stitch of his dirty laundry (only finding two things - it was right after laundry day), then shoving it into a ziploc bag and sniffing it. You "decide."

A lot of it is psycho, I know, but you gotta understand I'm going to be psycho right now. I have all the grief of a widow without any of the on-paper merit of it. I have had to make decisions like, what to wear to three separate grievance gatherings (a memorial in Utah, the open house in Idaho, and the final service the next morning). When I should go back to work. IF I can go back to work. What things of his I should pack for my own keepsakes before it gets hauled out of our home. Trying to find where he has hidden our private notes and pictures, before you hand his laptop over to the family who needs to scour it for any trace of life insurance. Whether to look at the aerial photos of the wreckage. When you don't get a face-to-face goodbye, or true closure, you decide, like you have some control.

1. You take scissors to a big, huge lock of your $3,000 mane of hair.

2. You allow the nieces and nephews of your reboyfriend to help you pick the most perfect long, thick lock of it.

3. You ask your mom to hack through it, a la Sixteen Candles. She cringes, cuz it's quite a chunk.

4. You tie it at the top with pink ribbon. The children watch in wonder.

5. On beautiful, textured stationery and pink pen, you write a love letter splotted with crocodile tears, remembering our song by Tracy Chapman, which applies now more than ever. That, if you can make a promise, if it's one that you can keep, I vow to come for you - if you wait for me.

6. You give the creepy lock of long hair to his mother, who has just barely learned that you were informally engaged (I wanna say betrothed, because engaged kinda means you got a ring, and because Jed was so damned determined to get it from a jeweler he met in Brazil on his mission, who he promised to go to for his bride's ring, I didn't get it in time).

7. You notice the look of shock and disbelief on reboyfriend's mom's face, which causes you to wonder if she thinks you're lying, as you are telling her he'd asked to marry you. (Hey, I wouldn't tell my blog before the ring came, either, so she shouldn't feel too bad).

8. You fear that she will forget the lock of hair and the love letter in the pretty little sparkly sheer drawstring pouch, so you call the funeral director the day of the open house, and make sure he knows not to shove it down in the folds of the casket, but into Jed's hands. He says he will ask Jed's mother, who is right there with him. It was a great way to make my paranoia and devastation appear instead to be some kind of distrust, which probably really helped things out. Cuz she didn't have enough to deal with. Sorry, Regina. I didn't mean to doubt you. I'm just crazy.

9. You finally tell Jake that you are ready to see the aerial wreckage photos from the Malheur County Sheriff. You confirm that yes, you are sure, after he gives you that look he has been giving you while protecting you from certain details, which he always calls my mom personally to ask her if I should know. You squeeze your sister's hand, shaking, as the files open on the computer monitor, and you see one wing on a grassy, rocky, Oregon bluff. And a scrap of metal 40 yards away. And a little speck 40 yards from that. You cry, and then you cry. You try not to throw up.

10. You go to a silversmith to get yourself that ring. It's the silversmith that your mom befriended back in her craft-fair days, back when they both had little booths where they sold their creations, became friends, and traded her homemade soap for his silver pieces. This silversmith now has a beautiful store in the Orem mall. You go in to find your OWN Jed ring, engraved with something powerful. With love words. With your promise to him. They can't get the engraving done before you must leave for the funeral. The classy girl behind the counter reads the inscription you want. She personally drives it to their engraver late that night, personally picks it up from his home the next morning (A Sunday, and the silver store is closed Sundays), and meets you at a gas station in the valley to personally deliver it to you in all its perfection, so that you may have it in time to wear on your ring finger at his funeral. You are told you are not to pay anything for the ring. You are not charged for the inscription. You sob into her as you hug her, you kiss her shoulder. Her name is Bethany Heath. The silversmith is Argento. Please don't ask them for free jewelry, but please always know that's who they are, what they're about, and what they did for the girl who didn't get her engagement ring in time.

I'm just crazy right now, and I get to be.

I am online. I have a friend that recently lost his wife (and unborn child). He was posting on Facebook 2 days after losing her. It seemed so weird to me.

Now I know.

I am a blogger. I know why my friend was online two days after his loss. It makes perfect sense to me now. It was a slice of normalcy. It was available and immediate. And it connected you to hundreds of people whose hearts were lent to you for a moment (or in most cases, an entire sleepless night), all at once, because they read your blog, your status, or hell...just your news interviews, (where you sounded like a total dork). I learned that people cope how they will cope. I will never question why someone is "doing so well" so soon after grief. Or, in some cases, "not doing so well" so long afterward. Ever. Sometimes it's just Xanax. Sometimes it's shock. Sometimes, they are people like me who don't let go of shit, like, ever.

I took two weeks off work. I don't even feel like it's enough, doesn't feel like I've had a real stretch of sink-in time. I've been committing myself to errands and tasks and other stuff. Writing a letter to Jed's family. Burning them each a CD with the song that I've been listening to on repeat. And other tasks. Hundeds of little ones that just add up in an unforgiving pile. Little ones like these:

Task: Remove Google alert for available airplane hangar for reboyfriend, so he could keep that cursed plane in salt lake near the house you were buying together. An alert came into my inbox today and wow, it stung.

Task: Unsubscribe to Victoria's Secret's relentless daily ENDS TODAY! Last chance to buy sassy stuff you could surprise your reboyfriend with! Mean mean SALE!!! notifications.

Task: Unsubscribe, for the love of God, to The Knot's newsletter reminding you of the countdown to Your Big Day. I hate The Knot. Eff The Knot.

This has been the darkest and most destructive period of my soul. I don't know what is left of my life or future or spirit. I do not know which way is forward. I do not know which way is up. Jake's wife's default ringtone just happens to be the one I set custom for when reboyfriend called me. Her phone rang as I was writing my last letter to him. I froze. The wind was knocked out of me. I turned to a puddle, realizing that he wasn't calling me. Poor sweet De'dy made a note of changing her ringtone, or at least turning it off around me. She probably felt bad. Don't feel bad, De'dy. I'm over it. It's kinda funny, really.

Lots of stuff is funny. Like how my cute little cousin Allie picks up on things nobody has really said directly to her. The other day, something fell. She said "It bonked into the ground, like Kirsten's friendboy."

Some things are sweet. Like how Jed used to worry he wasn't eloquent enough for me so one day when we were browsing at Urban Outfitters, and he came across The Big Book Of Words You Should Know, he said THAT was what he wanted for his birthday. I got it for him, feeling guilty. I also wrote him an old fashioned love letter, with the things I loved about him, how captivated I have always been. Sprayed with my perfume. He brought the book on every single date we had since then. He took it on every load he ran. He texted me definitions of great words, he tested my knowledge. He tried using them all in context. The cutest part of it all was that he kept the love letter folded inside it, never took it out.

I asked the family to search what could be recovered from the wreckage, for the book. I knew he had it with him on the trip. It was all I wanted of his belongings.

They couldn't find it.

When the plane broke apart, its contents were so scattered over such a vast stretch, that anything thrown from the backpacks will probably never be found. The violent wind that had spun their plane like a top, also carried the little red book through the air, across the desolate mountains. Somewhere, in the rough terrain of some mountains in Oregon only accessible by 4-wheelers or helicopters, is a letter written to a boy from a girl that talked about his combination of rebellion and kindness that she'd never seen anything like in her entire life, how he had captivated her for nine years, that said she was his and his only. Maybe someone will find it someday.

I've talked to a few people who have been through this. Most of them say I'll never be the same again. I say, I don't think I'll ever be OK. And then they tell me, in brutal honesty, that I probably won't. But they keep saying there will be what's called a "new normal." I guess I'll take what I can get.

But I don't want a new normal. I want the old one. Those moments where I woke up on the mornings I expected to be sleeping alone, only to find Jed wrangling his big, hairy legs around me and his face shoved in my neck and his beefy arms draped over me like a 4 year old with a teddy bear...those nights he got home from a long haul one day early, and crawled in bed with me when I was still asleep. My neck, his favorite smell, with his nose planted in the curve, snoring into my collarbone, happy and in love and at peace.

Right now, life feels not worth living.

I am desperate to remember proof...experiences where I felt like he loved me. Because I'm questioning it. I've been abandoned. He left me. I'm aware that he didn't choose to, but there's this sad little undeveloped part of your consciousness that has too much power, that isn't able to reason. It tells you he left you, therefore is not in love with you anymore. You're still desperately in love with him, but aw, it's now unrequited.

My old friend Noelle says: God has a plan and it is not to break you down.

Melissa says: There is a reason your souls were brought together in this life more than once, and I have no doubt that in the next life you will have him as a re-re-boyfriend.

I have one hundred responses to type, text, and call. I have every intention of them too. The things people have said to me have surpassed what I thought humans were even like (have you ever been to a little place called I-15? For awhile there, I thought humans suh-HUCKED).

The comments on my last two blogs, I mean, I have to take a day just for them.

A day just for you all. It took two hours just to write this post (probably not much less for you to read it...and if you've read this far, you amaze me, and YOU deserve a love letter from me floating somewhere in the desolate mountains).

Thank you for reading. Thank you for loving, for caring, for praying. Thank you for knowing about reboyfriend whose name I can now use. Thank you for letting my neurosis take up so much of your time. My love to you all.

A few of these pictures are very intimate, but something soothes me about sharing them. I feel like if you read all of this to the very end, you are enough of a friend to have the right to see these. A special thanks to my mom and little sisters who took my camera, and caught some of the moments I was too much of a basketcase to get for myself.

The below is a picture my mother took from outside the room, using a telephoto zoom. It my last moment alone with Jed. Nobody else was there. Nobody else knew I had gotten to the church. I'm so glad she snuck this in. I don't want to forget this moment.

 

Love notes tied to the bottoms of these little treasures, released from all the nieces and nephews.

Jake letting sweet Marli say her little farewell

Self-explanatory, but this was the cover to Jed's vault.

Jordan's widow, Shelley, treated me like I was her equal in this loss. She'll always have my fierce loyalty for how she didn't diminish my importance in Jed's life or death.

My lip gloss and tears smeared all sloppy on it. Sorry, babe. The nieces and nephews left little planes on it - their favorite and most magical memories of him were surely the times he took them up in the plane.

The three of them. Love the dignity of this.