Letting Go, Inch by Inch

This week I removed my wedding and engagement ring.  Well, full disclosure, I moved my wedding band to my right hand.  We will see how long this lasts, but I think it may stick, except for an occasional "relapse".  I tried to do it once before, at about six months or so, but I just couldn't do it. Having a naked ring finger just seems too, well, naked.  I plan on wearing the ring that Tom bought me for our 20th wedding anniversary on my left hand.  He had ordered it one month to the day before he died, and I didn't receive it until after his death.

When we became engaged we were so broke that we had little money for rings and decided to  use stones that we already had for my wedding set.  My engagement ring holds the diamond that was in my mom's engagement ring (she had lost the diamond out of the setting while digging in the garden and found it about a week later) and the side stones are my birthstone (garnets) given to me in a ring by my childhood babysitter when I was very young.  The diamonds in my wedding band are also from my mom's wedding set and one is from a ring that my grandmother wore and later gave to me.  There is a lot of history in the rings and therefore I will continue to wear them on my right hand since there is so much of my life and story in them.

Since removing my ring, I have fiddled with my left ring finger almost as much as I did when I first began to wear my engagement ring.  I remember being so enamored with it that I constantly was looking at it.  When I would get in the elevator at work, the lights made it sparkle like the sun and I would be mesmerized by it.  It wasn't the first engagement ring I ever had, but it was the perfect one.

Since moving past the one year anniversary of Tom's death, I feel like a weight has started to lift.  I am ready to let go of some of the heaviness of the grief.  I am not done mourning, not by any means, but I am willing to move forward.  I know this next year will be equally hard, albeit in another way, as I come to terms with the reality that my heart is learning what my head already knows.  I do not know what to expect.  I feel his presence in my life and in my heart.  It is true that love never dies.  I thought that was just a saying, but it isn't.  I still have many death duties to complete, and I will do them this year, as I am ready.  There are some things that still seem way too overwhelming to consider, like changing my FB status from married to Tom Radovanovich to widowed.  Or removing some of the many pictures of us together from the walls.  Nope.  Not ready. 

I seem to have fallen off a cliff at about nine months after Tom's death.  There were three months of the first Thanksgiving, the first Christmas, the first New Year's Eve, the first anniversary.  And then my milestone birthday.  It all took so much energy and was so incredibly hard.  There were some beautiful moments during those three months, but it was probably some of my hardest months.  I let myself feel and experience all of it.  Other things fell by the wayside during that time.  But now it is time to focus forward while remembering back and enjoying today.  For the next three months I am going to focus on the things that I couldn't focus on before--work and self care.  Head down, focus.  I know there will be moments and perhaps days that I will be swept away by a grief burst.  It will be OK.  To borrow a phrase from the Best Marigold Hotel "Everything will be all right in the end... if it's not all right then it's not yet the end."

Another inch of letting go.