Just Be

For most of my adult life, I have been very good at doing.

In fact, I wore busyness like a badge of honor.

I could manage a successful real estate business, help build and run a nonprofit that became a full-time job in itself, be a wife, run a household, and be a care partner. As Doug’s dementia progressed, managing our life increasingly became mine, the appointments and medications, bills and banking, the house and vehicles, repairs and contractors, and a thousand decisions that once belonged to two people. Eventually, care partnering became a 24-hour-a-day role.

And I was good at it.

Give me something that needed doing and I would do it. Give me a problem and I would figure it out. Add something else to the list and somehow I would make room for that too.

Doing was familiar territory.

And then all of that changed on July 16th at 3:06 a.m.

In the days immediately afterward, there were still things to do. Calls to make. People to notify. Decisions to make. All the details that accompany the loss of someone you have shared your life with.

But eventually, the list grew quiet.

And so did the house.

For the first time in longer than I could remember, there was nothing that required my immediate attention. No one whose needs I had to anticipate. No reason to listen for movement in another room or wonder what might be needed next. And no need to constantly observe a new behavior or change and try to understand what it was telling me, particularly in those final weeks, as Doug’s body began the natural process of shutting down.

The vigilance was over.

My real estate business had essentially come to a halt during the final months of caring for Doug. My role with Living Well with Dementia Sisters had already changed significantly as Doug needed more of me, and I ultimately made the decision to step away from the organization entirely. There were things I could have picked back up and responsibilities I could have stepped back into.

But I didn’t.

Instead, I made a decision that was surprisingly difficult for someone like me:

For 30 days, I would just be.

No major decisions.

No pressure to figure out what came next.

No expectation that I should be productive.

No rushing to fill the empty spaces with another project, another responsibility, or another version of myself.

Just be.

At first, the 30 days weren’t really about figuring anything out. They were about giving myself time and grace to feel whatever came, grief, fear, love, joy, without expectation or outside influence. I wasn’t requiring myself to make sense of any of it, fix anything, or decide what came next.

I needed to be quiet enough to hear what I was feeling in its rawest form, to acknowledge it, sit with it, and eventually begin to process it.

I wanted to give the quiet enough space to finally hear myself.

What I didn’t understand yet was how long it might take for the vigilance to leave me.

Caregiving changes the rhythm of your life.

Even when nothing is happening, you’re listening.

Is he awake?

Is he safe?

Does he need something?

Where is he?

What kind of day are we having?

What might happen next?

Over time, that vigilance becomes so normal you barely recognize you’re doing it.

And then one day, it stops.

There is grief in that silence that I don’t know how to adequately describe.

But there is something else there, too.

Stillness.

And somewhere in that stillness, I made a covenant with myself: to be honest about what I found there, even when the questions were uncomfortable.

I questioned whether Doug had truly loved me and, unexpectedly, found my answer in cards that we had exchanged over the decades. I asked myself whether I could honestly say I had no regrets. I allowed myself to look at our life together as it really was, not some softened version created by grief.

It wasn’t all rainbows and daffodils. There were hard years in the beginning of our relationship. Then somewhere along the way, we found us. We found our rhythm and built the life that was ours. And in the final third, as dementia increasingly changed our lives, I became Doug’s care partner.

The grace wasn’t in finding perfect answers.

The grace was in stopping long enough to hear the questions in the quiet.

Once I stopped requiring something from the days, I began noticing what they were giving me.

I stayed home when home was where I wanted to be. I sat outside with my coffee and my kiddos. I watered flowers and watched hummingbirds. I began learning to meditate. I cooked, not because somebody needed to be fed, but because I discovered that I loved cooking again.

I cried when I needed to. A lot.

And I laughed. A lot.

There were no expectations for any of it. No right way to spend a day. Some days were quiet. Some were productive despite my best intentions. Some surprised me with how ordinary they felt.

And I began to understand that this was where the freedom to just be was found: in having no expectations of what any of it was supposed to look like.

Slowly, something began happening that I hadn’t planned for.

I started noticing the woman underneath all those roles.

Wife. Care partner. Real estate broker. Nonprofit leader. Dementia educator and advocate.

They were all parts of me.

But none of them, by themselves, were me.

That realization brought another question with it:

Who am I when two of the most important roles of my life, wife and care partner, are no longer there?

I don’t have the answer yet.

And surprisingly, I’m not in a hurry to find it.

I’m enjoying the process of discovering her.

Being Doug’s wife didn’t simply disappear at 3:06 that morning. More than three decades of loving someone, building a life together, struggling together, laughing together and eventually caring for one another becomes woven into who you are. I may be learning to use the word widow, but being Doug’s wife will always be part of me.

Care partner feels different. That role did end. The watching, listening, anticipating, protecting and advocating that had become such a constant part of my life was suddenly no longer required.

And somewhere between those two truths, there I was.

Not trying to reinvent myself.

Just allowing myself the joy of discovering who I am now.

I’m nearing the end of the 30 days I gave myself to just be.

I still have ideas. Dreams, even. There are things I’m excited to build and work I know I want to do.

But I know something now that I didn’t know when these 30 days began.

There is a difference between a full life and a life that is simply full.

I’m learning to leave some room.

Room for quiet.

Room for grief.

Room for joy.

Room for curiosity.

Room for whatever comes next.

And sometimes, room for absolutely nothing at all.

I’m enjoying the process of discovering the woman who lives there.