If you follow my Twitter or Facebook, you might have said to yourself lately, “What is wrong with Betsy?” At least that what I would think if I was watching me through a fishbowl. If you don’t follow me, I’ve just been commenting on being annoyed, grouchy or emotional lately. I’m AWESOME when I’m totally into playing with Miles, shooting a client or deep in work, but when it gets quiet in the car or John and I are just cleaning up the kitchen late at night, I feel it. I haven’t known what my problem is and then I remember…

It’s May. Then after May, it’s going to be June. Then after June it’s July 4th. It suddenly feels like an overwhelming domino effect of memories sweeping back of events that spanned those 8-ish weeks six years ago.

I try hard to ignore the memories of what was going on six years ago, but despite my efforts, everything in my body remembers.

Six years ago, my husband at the time, Andy, had had enough of fighting the cancer that was destroying his body and he was ready to go home. May was when we wrapped up his treatments down at IU Med and prepared to go home to hospice to start what we thought would be our last summer together.

He was in hospice about 2 weeks. To say it went by too fast is the grandest of understatements.

To me, his wife who had centered her whole world around keeping him alive for two years, I felt so betrayed. So alone. Looking back, I can finally see why Andy was ready to be done with the fight. He was a brilliant young man who could no longer see. He had to walk with a walker and the cancer was in his brain, the most horrifying place imaginable to him. He didn’t want that body anymore. To me, I remember not understanding. I tried to understand and let him go, but I couldn’t stop fighting for him.

Nurses came, but hospice nurses weren’t like anything I was used to. They weren’t there to act fast and heal. It was like a sick joke. They were there to hold their hands folded in their laps and remind me that he was dying. It was my personal nightmare.

I could write pages and pages about the horrors of hospice, but it would shred my soul to relive it. It was, hands down, the absolute scariest, heart breaking and despite the hundreds of people rallying around me, an incredibly lonely time in my life. I almost said loneliest time, but of course, nothing compares to the loneliness that set in after he passed. (BUt that’s ANOTHER story…)

I have done a lot of work to help myself heal from those days in hospice. I try hard every year to remember the good memories, focus on how Andy is free of that broken body and how much peace I feel from him. Try to focus on how my life is very blessed with the lessons I’ve learned from him.

As I said though, as hard as I try to focus on the good, my body can’t help but remember.

Losing Andy, and those days surrounding the trauma of witnessing him letting go, are so deeply imbedding in my being. It’s like the force of that experience was so severe, it was as if that whole time was really a million years pressed into rock and those memories are a fossil impression on my bones.

So when I start getting short, emotional or grouchy in the spring, John and I look at each other and we say, almost in unison, “Oh yea, it’s May…” The sweetness of John and his patience with me always is a reminder to myself to be gentle with myself during this time.

My whole point of this is to just remind myself that my path has left marks on me that aren’t going to just fade with time. So getting grouchy here and there in May and June is just one of the marks I carry with me now. It’s just a small price to pay for an experience that shaped me so deeply and makes me who I am today.

I probably just totally freaked out all the clients I’m going to be working with for the next month! No worries! As I said, it’s not the busy daylight hours that bring up my “fossils.” There’s something about the day breaking into night that triggers these feelings. I don’t know if those were the loneliest and scariest times for me during Andy’s illness, or if it’s just a metaphor for life passing into death. (It’s probably just when I’m tired!) Either way, it’s usually just my family that see’s my moods and bless John for being here for me in the amazing way he always is. Until now, of course, when I also share it with anyone who stumbles across this funky little blog.

Hopefully exposing these fossils for all to see will help me to clear them away. Kind of like if you touch a fossil too much, it will crumble. Hopefully sharing my story will help the pain crumble away a bit so I can remember the memories not pressed into my bones, but the good stuff illuminating my heart.

Thanks for listening to me and hanging in there with my ups and downs. This post might alarm you, but I’m fine. It’s just a yearly process for me. I appreciate being able to share this part of my life alongside my photography. It might seem odd to mix the two, but when I share, I share all of me. So here I am. As Ingrid Michaelson just sang in the song going through my mix, “Take me as I am.” I’ll do the same for you if you wish.

With all of that, I’m shushing and heading to bed. Probably all these “fossils” need is some good old fashioned rest, something kind of rare around here.