Okay, I'll admit it. This death has really shaken me. My reactions haven't all been negative. This cloud has a little silver lining. But the whole experience has turned my life and the plans I had for my immediate future upside down. Enmeshed into that are a variety of both expected and unexpected emotions. I have described many of my thoughts and emotions in the last few posts. Now I will describe my behavior. If my plan for the next two years is a whiteboard that has now been erased, then staring at a blank whiteboard is something I find very unsettling. I mean VERY unsettling. No longer is there the impetus to go out and beat the pavement because I need to meet a daunting financial obligation. That obligation dictated much of what I was going to do. I didn't see myself as having the luxury of going to the theater, buying any of the great deals I was getting daily on my email, planning vacations or looking for leisure activities I might find fun to do. My need to work ruled how my schedule looked. I had built my plans around that. I was focused on getting as many substituting days as I could, building a clientele of tutoring students, and seeing how many foreign exchange students I could house. The mandate to do that all was wiped off my whiteboard when Bill died. I didn't know how to handle it. The first few days after I arrived home from up north were vast expanses of nothingness. A day without a schedule? A day without plans? Hadn't heard of one of those in years, maybe decades. But it was more than days, really. It was a matter of an entire future lying in front of me saying, "What are you going to do now?" And I had no idea what I was going to do. The house seemed too still, too quiet. There were days I stayed in bed all day. There were days I didn't get out of my pajamas until after noon. It continues now. There are a lot of things I could be doing but I have also felt tired, listless, fatigued for what seems like no reason. I don't have any energy. I don't want to exercise. I don't want to take on any of the home improvements I had readied myself to do. And I ask myself, "What about Bill's being gone from this earth has made this change? Was knowing that he still existed have a role in my feelings of purpose? Did I think things would just always be a little tense as long as he was alive?" I don't know. All I do know is that since he died, things have become vastly different. Are they good? Bad? I think they are good. I also think I am having trouble adjusting to them.