Grief.

Here's what I learned about the rules of grief in the past two months.

There are no rules at all.

Some days you wake up and feel ok.  Not great by any means.  Not even good.  Some days, ok is as good as it is going to get.  So you get out of bed.  Maybe you shower.  Maybe you stay in your dead husband's bathrobe all day and become "that person" who takes the dog out looking like some old Italian lady wearing a thousand layers of clothes (I say this with the authority of being related to many of those old Italian ladies).  

But either way, you've gotten out of bed.  So, yay, you!  You've done something today.

And then you pour your coffee and sit down.  If you are anything like me, the tv is turned on almost immediately to ward off the silence.  Music used to fill your house, but it's almost too painful to listen to now.  So tv is your new bestie.  You wake up to it, go to sleep with it, let it babysit the dog while you're gone...It's on for approximately 20 hours a day.  And you aren't really even watching anything.  It's the same shows all the time - mindless things you know by heart.  Just sounds in the background to fill up the overpowering silence.

And what do you do with your day while Benson and Stabler are out bustin' perps on USA?

Not much.

You sit. 

Scroll through your phone.

Try to read.

Maybe eat.

Go back to bed.

Get up and do it again.  

You roam around your house like a zombie - and not a fast moving, Zombieland zombie; you're one of the old school, black and white, George Romero Night of the Living Dead, zombies.  Maybe you brush your teeth, but, let's be honest - that's only happening if you have to leave the house, and you've become very good at avoiding that.  Your hair becomes greasy, matted, but you hide it by throwing it in a bun.  You know you are starting to stink, but ignore it - there's body spray if and when you have to deal with anyone in person.  You ignore the mail, the bills that are sent to your dead husband - the one that charged him $4000 to die in their emergency room (no.  seriously.  you looked up the diagnostic code...they literally sent a death bill to a dead man), or the one that charged him $1500 for the ride in the ambulance to the emergency room, where they would eventually charge him $4000 for dying there.

You ignore phone calls and texts from your friends and family because, honestly, how many times can you say "I'm ok" when the person asks you that fucking answerless question: "how are you doing?"

You don't know how you are doing because you aren't you anymore.  

It's sounds like a cliché, but it's true.  Part of you is missing.  And you are trying to figure out how you are supposed to feel.

You don't avoid people to be rude.  You don't do it because you don't want to be around people (although, sometimes, you don't).  You do it because you aren't who you were before.  And you don't know what to do with that.  You don't know how to act.  You don't want to see people struggle with what to say or, even worse, look at you with that look.  

So you avoid them.  In the beginning you tried to go out once a day.  But now, especially on weekends, you try to stay inside.  You Doordash your meals.  You become fixated on shit you don't need (I'm looking at you, 4 bottles of Gain Fabric Softener).

Grief is sad.  And angry.  And ugly.  And smelly.

It's lonely, and loud and quiet.

It's all encompassing and exhausting.

And people tell you it won't last forever. And common sense tells you it won't last forever.

But common sense has no place in grief.

Because grief is a selfish, fucking bitch.