Katherine - my beloved partner died August 7, 2016, after an 8 month battle with cancer.
Tyson and I only met in December of 2014, and he was diagnosed in November of 2015. In the scheme of things, it was only a short relationship, but he had a huge and wonderful impact on my life.
Mel, I love your image of seeing your grief out of the corner of your eye. It's there but you just can't grab hold of it. And not being able to move fluidly through the world when it has hold of you.
I feel like I am lurching along in my life right now. Sometimes I feel on top of things, such as in my full time job as a kindergarten teacher, and starting to catch up with jobs at my house (everything non-essential gets abandoned when your loved one gets ill - sure helps you decide what is important in life!) Other times I feel overwhelmed with all I think I should be doing, and I have to keep telling myself to be gentle with myself, and I need to recognize that that is when the grief is suffocating me.
I find I am doing little inventories, either mental or actually written down, of things I am getting done to prove to myself how well I'm doing. Who would believe I am finding solace in lists, and documenting things? But it helps! And one of the gifts to myself was going back through photos (all digital now really)I took through our relationship and printing off the ones I loved and making myself a little album. It's almost like I can't believe it all happened. Plus it was so good to find pictures of the fantastic times we had together at the beginning, because the second half of the relationship was looking after an increasingly ill man and some of those images (especially the night he died) were riveted in my memory, and I needed to push them aside with some great photos of how much he made me laugh and how much fun we had, falling in love in middle age!