Here are the reasons why a daily and weekly gratitude project is so important: I have not slept more than four or five hours a night in over a week. My brother tested positive for COVID on Saturday. He’s doing okay, but I’m worried that my sister-in-law will get it and I don’t think she’ll be able to handle it so well. My chin is going through a second puberty and is broke out worse than I ever had breakouts as a teen. Chris’s AARP card showed up in the mail recently and it was a kick in the gut because Chris would be turning fifty tomorrow if he was still with us. It makes me furious that he’s not here so that we can laugh about him turning fifty and taking advantage of all the discounts. I watched a number of stories on this week’s CBS Sunday morning that left me ugly crying on the couch and one of the surprising one’s was the interview with Stanley Tucci. His wife has been gone for eleven years. He has remarried, but he said that grieving his first wife never gets easier. It is the same now as it was eleven years ago.

It is the same now as it was nine years ago.

On the outside, I look like I’m holding my shit together. I nod and smile at people. I try to speak with a light tone of voice. I tell when I am asked that I am fine and good and I hope that I’ve put on the appropriate disguise to make that look believable. On the inside, I am a dark hole of nothingness. I feel like I am two people, the one I present to the world and the sad old lady I’m trying to hide from the world. Pandemic fatigue has settled in deep, creating an even heavier blanket over the grief that comes with February. This grief has me questioning every aspect of my current life. It always does and then I feel the failure of not living my life in honor of Chris. I am stuck looking through the album of the things we never got to do together instead of turning the pages to the pictures of all the things we did get to do. I keep telling myself that I am doing my best, but I really don’t think that I am.

This week, Harry Styles the Caterpillar attached himself to the lid of his new habitat and built himself a cocoon out of his own hair. We learned that Harry has already been living for sixteen years and when he emerges as a moth, he will only live for about two weeks. His timing for turning into a moth could not be worse. Temperatures here are going to plummet and stay cold for the next few weeks. When he emerges, our choices are to let him free inside the house to lay eggs somewhere or release him out into the freezing elements. The moth is Chris. We did all that we could to make the last two weeks of Chris’s life comfortable with as much joy as we could muster. This is what I will do for Harry Styles. I’m going to make his last two weeks with us as comfortable as I can because I cannot control the weather and that is the lesson here.

Learning to accept the things you cannot control.

That is a real hard lesson for some of us. Am I grateful to have learned it? I guess… not really or maybe the assignment for this particular life lesson didn’t need to be so harsh. But I’ve learned it and I’ve learned it well. I’ve learned what I can control and that is the memories I choose to conjure up in my mind. Those memories trump the last two weeks and even the last two months of Chris’s life. Those memories include every goofy face he made, every kooky hilarious idea he came up with, and how he made me laugh every single day. Those memories are what I am grateful for today.