This afternoon I stopped by the furniture store on the way home from work. Last night I was thinking about getting a new dresser for the bedroom, and moving our old dresser into the back bedroom to use for sheets and towels. Dan and I had talked about doing something similar for several months, but never got around to it. When I was looking at dressers, the first thing that would go through my head was "Would Dan like it?" and then I had an overwhelming feeling of disloyalty. I posted about it in Facebook (my "general place to vent and get feedback") and one of my friends asked why it was disloyal - we had been talking about it, and I was just following through. I replied in sort of freewriting, just letting whatever was in my head come out, and was surprised when I read it:

"Disloyal in making changes without him, that what I might want isn't something that he would have wanted (our tastes were very similar but not identical), that somehow making changes is too soon or wrong... it's like I realize that I have to be my own person and I have to go on, but at the same time it feels like I shouldn't because going on without him is like going on without a part of me. I don't want to be "me", I want to be "us" but I know that I can't be "us" because he's gone. And even though I'll always have "us" in my heart, I have to live in the physical world too and it's just confusing."

The past couple of days I've felt like I had it more "together" and was doing okay, and part of me was worried that I seemed to be coping... unsure if it was "acceptance" or "avoidance". Thinking about the furniture and making changes, thinking about life a couple of months down the road instead of focusing on surviving the next couple of days. And then I realize that there are still rooms in my house that I avoid - the back bedroom and the den where our computers are - and I realize that no, I'm not coping as well as I may think I am. But I'll take the temporary calm in my life at the moment, and deal with the pain again when it comes. I know it will. Even just in the few minutes I spent going through our dresser and trying to figure out what to do with his things started bringing up the panic again, so I closed the drawer and decided to do it another time. "Getting rid" of his stuff also falls into the "disloyal" category... so maybe it's not time for me to deal with it yet.