Hello

It's been a long time since I've blogged. Life sure has changed a lot since my last post. In case you've never read my blog before: Hi, I'm Jennifer.......wife to Jason and mom to Hudson and Cooper. My husband, Jason, passed away a week ago today. I guess this will serve as my form of "therapy" for a while. My sister encouraged my oldest son to journal his thoughts so today I decided to do the same for myself.

I don't have the emotional energy tonight to go into detail of my husband's death. I will though, just so that I can walk myself through those 2 days and fully process everything that happened. For now, I'll just start with today.

Today (like all the others) has been a mixture of emotions. One minute I feel such peace. Peace that I know only comes from God. The next minute I feel so completely overwhelmed. Overwhelmed that I have 2 sons to raise. Happy. Happy that my husband is in heaven. Jealous. Jealous that my husband is in heaven. Pissed. Pissed that my husband is in heaven. See the roller coaster ride of emotions? This has been what the last 7 days have been like for me.

Yesterday I spent some time with my financial planner. Let me first say this: IF YOU DO NOT HAVE A WILL, GET ONE TODAY. I can't even fathom how overwhelmed I would be if Jason and I had not had a will. DO NOT put it off. My husband was 40, in the best shape of his life, did not smoke, exercised 3 times a week and weighed 177 pounds when he died. I cooked almost every meal we ate. We ate very healthy. There were no warning signs. This too could be your reality.

Today I spent some time making phone calls to various companies to have Jason's name removed from our accounts. This has been extremely painful. I feel like I'm erasing him from our family. I don't want just my name there. We've been married for over 11 years and it's always been Jason and Jennifer. How in the world did I get here?

The early morning and late at night are the hardest for me. In the morning, my eyes open and my heart immediately begins to pound out of my chest. This is not a dream. This is my reality, my living nightmare. The daytime has been somewhat bearable......one because my mom is here but also because I'm kind of use to being alone or doing my own thing during the day since I'm a stay at home mom. Evenings are hard. This is when Jason would come home and things were whole. We would eat dinner together. Talk. The boys would all wrestle. Build Lego's. Make memories. Jason and I would take turns each night with the boys. One night I'd put Cooper down while Jason put Hudson down and the next night we'd flip flop. We would read, talk and pray with the boys. It gave us some alone time with each of them. I'm so thankful that we had that routine but again, overwhelmed that now it's just me. Once my mom leaves, I try to envision what my nights after the boys go to bed will look like. I feel my blood pressure rising at the thought of it. I always told Jason that I never slept good when he wasn't home. And that was the truth. But I would tell him how wonderful it was to have the entire bed to myself and to not listen to his snoring.....but I'd endure constant snoring and no part of the bed to have him back. Weird that some of the things that annoyed me are the things I miss most.

The funeral guy called me today. Really sweet guy but he started the conversation out "hello, the cremation has been done and the urns are ready to be picked up." Sorry, but this sent me into full on cry mode. Although I was comfortable with the choice to cremate (we discussed this prior to his death) it still hurt really bad to hear the words that it had taken place. One more thing to remind me that this is real.

The boys have had their moments (usually morning and night like me) but I would say that today was a good day for them. They started back to school on Tuesday and I can't even begin to say how awesome the staff has been to us. When we first met the boys' teachers, Jason and I felt so good about them. It just felt right. I 100% know that God's hand was all over the placement in the classes. They are both amazing and are loving on my boys when I can't be there. Hudson's class put a HUGE basket together with Lego kits, star wars stuff, books, movies, treats and a sweet book about what the students loved about him. They were so excited to get home and open it up. It was really the first time in the last week that I saw and heard the normal laughs and smiles.

All day, I've had the words from the song "No Tears in Heaven" playing around in my head. It was one of the songs we sang at his service and one that I picked because it gives me great peace to know that there are no tears there. He isn't sad. If given the chance, he wouldn't come back and I honestly wouldn't expect him too. I've always known that this is not our home and that we really are just passing through. This past week has made that more evident to me. I just wish this had been his home a little longer.