Good Morning Folks. I don’t normally write to you fine folks on a Sunday, other than to syndicate the weekly AggroChat Podcast. We did not record one of those for various holiday related reasons, and in truth the next big show we have… requires all seven of us. In theory we should return next week with our big two-parter Games of the Year show. This morning instead I am going to write a fairly personal an introspective post, the sort that I don’t normally syndicate widely and are just for the “real ones” who check my blog regardless of what fancy pictures might get posted on social media. So sit back and let me tell you a story.
Yesterday one of my friends asked me a very simple question, and I gave them quite possibly the heaviest answer that I have ever given to something so simple. Normally you say things like that you would like to lose some weight or exercise more, and both of those things are true… but I have a much more simple goal this year. Essentially it is my goal to start living life again. Since then death of my spouse I have been in a bit of a holding pattern, not entirely certain what to do with my life. Sure I went through the anguish and heartbreak… and still do from time to time, but replaced it more than anything was a growing sense of numbness. I have felt like I have been effectively sitting here waiting to die. Sure I did a few things to make that wait more comfortable… bought a new TV, organized the garage and set up a 3d printer out there, and even upgraded my gaming desktop. However in all cases they were more things to pass the time until I died myself, than anything resembling trying to do something specific with my life.
There is a kind of pain that no one will ever fully understand unless they have lost a spouse. You build this life with a person, and then they are suddenly gone… and it feels like most of you went along with them. I’ve told people that I died on July 2nd, 2025 and that is not necessarily hyperbole. The me that I was at that moment in time… did in fact die when my spouse passed away. I had a good life, and I got thirty years of it… but it felt like everything about that life was suddenly crashing down around me. In many ways I was wiped with a clean slate… not even really knowing who I was anymore. The me that existed before my wife… was such a fledgling thing. I think I was not really sure where to go from here. So much of what drove me, so much of what I did with myself… was in service of the life that I built with this other person and that is a life that is now gone.
There is something like a 90% increase in mortality for men who lose a spouse. In many cases this is exacerbated because in traditional relationships the woman is the caregiver, and the man… just does not have the survival skills to keep going. That was not the case for me, because in most ways I was the primary caregiver and I still technically have the skills required to keep going. The problem is… most of the time I didn’t really want to. I felt like I was a robot who had completed its task and was awaiting new orders, and as a result I just sat dusty in the back of some cabinet as my battery slowly drained. It is so easy to just give up. I did… for effectively the remainder of this year. I did not really care about much of anything other than the occasional bursts of phantom joy that I would get playing a game or talking to one of my friends.
I am not certain the exact moment… but in the time between Christmas and New Years I have decided that I am going to live. That seems like an odd statement, but it is something that I have had to consciously make. I am going to live my life and more importantly… I am going to move forward and move on past the death of my spouse. I’ve felt like on many levels the friends and family of my spouse have needed me to spend my life in contrite grief pining away for her… that somehow my wasting slowly as my battery runs out, helped them recover from the death more easily. I can’t be that person for them anymore. I am too fucking young and I have too much of my life in front of me. Best guess based on the how others in my family have gone, I probably have about forty years in front of me… and that is too long to slowly die. My grandfather died in his mid 90s and my Dad is still spry and kicking, so I can’t see that I will likely be much different. I need to make those forty years mean something.
One of the ways in which I have taken action, rather than letting actions happen… is I finally met up with my friend Aigie/Saracell for a meal. She has lived in Oklahoma for almost a decade at this point, but was always far enough way and the timing never seemed right… so we never actually met up. This is weird given, that this was a person that I used to talk to every single day without fail. Hell you can look at the first posts on this blog, and it was her commenting on them. We were great friends that time happened to… and we stopped playing the same games… and sort of faded apart. Thing is… someday never comes unless you make it happen. I always expected that eventually we would meet in person, but neither of us were making it happen so I did.
We met up for dinner yesterday and it was a lot of fun reminiscing about old times. The most hillarious thing is that prior to the meeting I was talking with my friend Tam, who was also in Late Night Raiders… and apparently he had zero clue that “Saracell” and “Aigie” were the same person. It makes sense, because really she did not come into her own until she became a healer and there was a massive boost in confidence that happened at the same time. Saracell the Warlock was somewhat quiet and composed and almost sheepish, but Aigie the braid twirling Dwarven Priest was a force to be reckoned with. I am not so certain about the place we met up to eat, but I am sure we will repeat the act of sharing a meal at some point in the future. It will take will and purpose to make that happen, and I will take that extra step to ensure that it does.
I’ve also been talking with someone new… that I met in the least likely of possible places. I’ve talked before by the thoroughly unlikely meeting of my wife and I and our introduction from a man in Belgium when we grew up 30 minutes apart… this one is almost as uncanny but only so because of the current state of the internet and how toxic it can be. I met a new friend on Reddit. I’ve hung out on Reddit for years, making random comments on random threads… and the algorithm fed me a thread and in that thread was a random person who made a sassy comment… and I responded. That led to chatting back and forth through the Reddit direct messaging system, and that sort of carried on for days… and then weeks. More recently we have transitioned to talking on Discord, removing another layer of anonymity from it. I don’t know where it is going, but it has been really nice… and I have spent an awful lot of the last couple of weeks watching the typing indicator with baited breath.
This may go nowhere… and that is okay. The important thing that happened though… is it taught me that I could in fact develop feelings for another person. I am not entirely certain what those feelings entail… but it isn’t the bleak numbness that I have felt since July. I can move on. I can potentially love again. I legitimately thought that side of me was dead. That I had lost the ability to feel anything anymore, and would effectively just sort of fumble through life from this point on like the shambling dead. The fact that I CAN feel anything… is a fucking miracle at this point. I am not going to push any pressure on this however, because things need to develop in their own course. They have asked nothing of me, and I am attempting to ask nothing of them. It is just really refreshing to have someone that I am nervous in the best possible ways to talk with each day.
I honestly was not sure if I would say anything here about it. We are going to call her “Ren” for the sake of this blog. She does not have the breadth of gaming experience that most of us do, and as such has never really had a fixed gaming handle to fall back upon. Nor does she really have much of a social media footprint either. She has used the name Ren before and it seems good enough for the sake of keeping things nice and anonymous. That is one thing I have always tried with my blog… is to boil a situation to the real elements but not share any of the hard details. I did this for decades as a safety mechanism to keep anything I did from blowing back on my teacher spouse. I will likely continue to do this thing, because it feels more comfortable to share the real emotions and thoughts of a moment, without necessarily all of the specific people.
This is a pretty heavy post I know. If you have made it to this point I applaud you. You are in fact one of the “real ones” as it were. I am going to live. Hopefully if I am lucky, I will love again. Regardless I am going to figure out who the hell I am, and how best to support that fledgling person left in the aftermath of my life. I appreciate all of you and how you have supported me over the years. Be gentle with me as I figure this out.
The post I Resolve to Live appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
