Sara kept bullet journals off and on through the time I knew her. This is a method of organization where you take a blank journal with gridlines or dot matrix lines, and create your own planner/list layouts. People (like Sara) will get super fancy with them – spending hours creating their new layouts for the week/month/year. She would create sections in the journals for monthly calendars, weekly calendars, notes, aspirational lists, weekly inspirational quotes, habit tracking, books she wanted to read, notes for work… the list goes on and one. I am fortune enough to have found one of these that Sara had been using for roughly the first year of our relationship.
I picked the purple Moleskine journal up tonight and flipped through it – just seeing Sara’s beautiful, distinct journaling script causes my heart to tighten and my eyes to well up with tears. I can close my eyes and see her hand tracing the lines onto the pages, her excitement at placing cute stickers onto a page or coming up with another new way to use the journal.
Sara’s notes in her journal calendars capture some of our early dates – the movie-night we planned to go see a Hunger Games movie on December 4th, 2015 that ended early when we got the movie times mixed up. It was a good thing we went back to her place early because we found Elvis standing in the middle of her mangled, cheap apartment blinds howling with a voice only beagles can let loose. I see my employer’s 2015 holiday party a week later where she looked at me starry-eyed and said it was the fanciest party she’d ever attended. The yule ritual that was held at my place about a week later, where Sara met some of my circle of friends, and then right after that our Red Lobster & zoo lights date that was so magical. (I sure did know how to woo her, if I do say so myself!)
She has various birthdays noted, get-togethers with friends, work dates, and more. In May 2016 she has “Florida!” noted across 5 days when I took her to Ft. Lauderdale, which I found out was the trip that convinced her she would marry me. In August 2016, she has a layout with 4 sea turtle stickers (I think from our aforementioned trip to Florida), with “ROAD TRIP noted for August 11th-16th, our one road-trip together to go visit family in California. She’d also noted August 21st as her last day at her job, and August 31st as her last day at her apartment – that’s when she moved in with me!
This journal is such a gift, but it also elicits such strong tears and pain. She was MY PERSON. We fit just so amazingly perfect together, and it was right from the very start. These reminders of everything we navigated together – from the mundane to the major – are what stir up the strongest response from deep within my soul right now. In our wedding vows, she vowed that we would always have fun together, whether we were boring people who bored each other by being boring, or when going on adventures – and that really captures the essence of what was beautiful about our relationship. She and I were happy and content together – whether we were zoned out watching the 5th episode of a binge on netflix, or whether we were driving across the country together.
Toward the end of this journal, she even had an initial wedding to-do list (though the actual wedding dates are covered in another journal I found). I also found some questions she’d noted down for work to ask panelists in an engagement about caregiving. These caught my eye, as they would become all too relevant to our very own relationship only a few years later.
I came across one particular slip of paper tucked into another book of hers – it looks like it had been torn from a regular writing journal that she’d had in 2015/2016. There were some folded pages from May 2015, and then a scrap that said: “1/15/16: First I have to say that I looked back to the first entry in this notebook and looked at the list of what I wanted in a partner and I can truly say that I have found it. Every single thing on that list describes Trent. I am so blessed to have found him.” The other pages with the note included the list she was referencing.
Why would the universe bring us together, two people so perfectly matched for each other, only to take her away? This just hurts, so much.
I love Sara so much, and these journals are one thing that will still release a flood of tears. Tonight, I’m purposefully embracing those tears and writing into them. I treasure these journals even if they do break my heart – they’re a reminder of the wonderful, imperfect life we had together, the day to day, which is all I ever wanted. I was expecting we would get somewhere between 20 and 35 years of that life, not 4.
-What did you do to maintain a romantic relationship as caregiving needs increased?
-What was the most unexpected challenge? What was your most unexpected source of support?
-How did you learn to do the caregiving tasks that were needed?
-What advice did you get that was NOT helpful?
-In what ways do you feel you changed as a result of this journey?
