You go first

10.7.13
   (I had to start dating these again because I keep forgetting where I am in our story. I haven't re-read any of these blogs because I know that most of them will be riddled with run-on sentences and grammatical errors, so trying to remember where I was has been a little difficult!)

    Alex had to return to work in El Paso on the 7th, so we made the drive from Dallas to the west over a few days. We stopped for a night in Midland where our parents live, and saw some family for a little while when we were there.

    The weekend before the 7th was spent trying to find Alex a place to live off base. We looked at a lot of different rooms for rent, and finally found one that was pretty decent (he only has to share a bathroom with one other guy, which for him isn't a big deal but was interesting for me since I stayed out there a week). Sunday evening I can honestly say I had some pretty severe anxiety about Alex going back to work and being by myself for the first time since everything happened. I didn't feel like I was ready to be alone, and I definitely didn't know what I was suppose to do with myself while he was at work. I had brought a big bag of books (I am an avid reader) and was probably a little over ambitious about how much reading I expected to do. The time came on Monday morning for him to leave, and I literally cried for the next 30 minutes by myself. I just felt completely overwhelmed with being alone. I had a lot of friends I could have called, but at this point it was really difficult for me to talk on the phone with people. I would do ok for part of the time but inevitably I would end up in a pile of tears feeling really awkward as I couldn't tell the person what I was feeling and had to rely on them to sit there and listen to me cry for a few minutes.

   Luckily, Alex was able to only work a half day most of the days that week. So I would basically sleep as late as I could, wake up and watch the news, maybe read a little bit, and then wait for him to get home. Every evening he had to go check back in on base to show everyone that he hadn't gone AWOL (this is standard for all the guys in the army, not just Alex), and that first evening I went with him and waited in the car for him to finish. Monday evening was the first time that he had seen most of the guys in his unit since Kaitlyn's passing, so I was curious to know how everything went.

    Remember when you were a little kid and you were scared of something so you would make one of your friends do it first to make sure it wasn't too dangerous? That's pretty much how I felt with Alex going back to work. I felt like I had given him a shove in the back and said, "You go first" and then as soon as he came back I needed to know all the details of how everyone reacted. Did they say something dumb? Did your feelings get hurt? How did they react? Did anyone talk to you? What did they say? We had been talking about how most of the people we had talked to would ask us "How are you doing?" in a whispered tone, like they expected us to break down crying as soon as they brought it up. In all fairness, sometimes I do start crying randomly, but probably 80% of the time I am really ok. I can say that I have approached a lot of people who I know had suffered losses (parents, siblings, whoever) the same way that people were now approaching us, with a soft timidity coupled with a look on their face of pure sorrow. What we were craving at this point was normalcy. We wanted people to act normal, talk normal, just be normal with us so that we could feel normal. The guys that Alex worked with approached him in the whispered tones, and it made me dread going back to my own work even more. The job that I have requires me to travel to about 8 different hospitals, all of which had watched my belly grow and listened to my excited stories about our daughter's arrival. What I dread about my first few weeks back is that I will get to do the "first time seeing people after a loss" 8 times, and probably answer the same questions about a bazillion times. I don't know if its better for people to just act like everything is back to normal or at least ask once how we are doing. I obviously don't really want to rehash the entire episode every time I run into somebody I haven't seen yet, but at the same time I think it would be hard if nobody asked.