This past weekend, and finishing today, I finally updated the “What’s Up?” daily task section of my personal organisation system, and that meant filling in the dates for every day of the year. A photo of the last page for 2024 is up top.
I barrelled ahead, even when I screwed up something, like twice writing “2023” even after having written “2024” lots of times, or maybe it was just writing less legibly than I’d have preferred. The only thing I re-did was after I discovered that somehow I managed to skip two weeks in November, and that happened for the same reason I screwed up the year or had messy handwriting: My mind wandered, part of the reason i created my organisation system in the first place.
Until Nigel died, I’d never have given a second thought to writing about what’s essentially a planning calendar for a year, and that’s because the very idea of mortality just wasn’t in my head. Then it suddenly was—every day, and in so many ways that I never knew could exist.
In the first months of my widowerhood, I just kind of assumed I’d die soon, too, something I wrote about at the time, that it really is possible to die of a broken heart. Then, it was my still unresolved health issues, then the global health issue of the pandemic, and then—well, it’s complicated.
My whole life plan was simple: To grow old with Nigel. Without him, I no longer saw a distant future. Instead, I saw a day, a week, maybe a month—or sometimes even a few months—into the future, and nothing much beyond that.
At the same time, I also knew that, demographically/statistically speaking, I should have around 20 years or so to go (assuming…), and if I make it that far, I could well see a few years more beyond that. With such a potentially long streak ahead of me, I realised I needed to think seriously about what that would look like: Where would I like to be (geographically and existentially), and what would I like to be doing?
I started thinking about those long-term issues, and probably within six months of Nigel’s death, something that I also learned is common among widow/ers. However, at first there’s often a bit of panic associated with the thoughts, as well I know.
Sometime in the past year or so, these thoughts became more deliberate and purposeful. I absolutely haven’t yet been able to answer any of those questions about what/where future me will be, but careful thought replaced panic and idle speculation long ago (relatively speaking—time feels both slower and faster to me than it seemed to my non-bereaved self), and serious thought is vital to serious progress toward a future, even if its precise look and feel is unseeable and unknowable.
Which brings me back to the planning calendar. I now presume the existence of a future, and writing out the dates on a planning calendar for an entire year is a concrete example of that. It wasn’t all that long ago that planning anything that would happen more than a few months out would have felt dangerous, like it was tempting fate. Now, I didn’t give it a second thought until I was in the middle of writing the dates months away from now. Maybe that thought/realisation is what made me screw up the dates as I wrote them? (actually, it may well have been: It’s quite common for nearly any distraction to throw me completely off course).
So, my work on setting up the daily task section of my personal organisation system may seem small and ordinary, just another ordinary, even boring, sort of thing that we do in our ordinary daily lives. For me, though, it’s tangible proof that I again have extreme optimism that I expect to still be here at the end of the year. Sure, fate may have other ideas—that bastard too often does—but I’m no longer the one assuming a bad thing could happen, let alone that it will. None of this is something I could’ve appreciated until around four years ago. Add it to the list of the things that have changed in me.
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