Last night I got to talk to the lady from the grief support group that I'd been put in contact with as a mentor.  I hadn't talked with her in several weeks, and it was good getting to catch up.  The first part of the conversation was just checking in, how I'm doing with work, with sleep, with eating, and so on.  She seemed to think I'm doing pretty well with the day-to-day stuff right now.  I'll take her word for it, as it sure diesn't feel like it to me right now.

Where it got interesting was when she asked me to tell her about Ariel.  Most of what came up at first was the good stuff about her.  Seh worked hard, she loved animals, she was very interested in learning how to heal people (especially alternative healing), she had a sharp sense of humor.  That was most of it.  Some of the bad things from the last couple years came up, but I was surprised thinking back on it how much of it had been the good things.  Afterward, I was really grateful for it, as it helped me hang on to the sense of having had some good time with her.....a lot of good time, to tell the truth.  In the last few weeks it'd felt more and more like I was just losing all of her, and it helped getting to see that the good stuff is still there, that I can still remember those times.

It still hurts.  It still feels very unreal at times, leaving me almost blinking and wondering how it could be that she's gone.  At least today, though, it was good to have some sense of the valuable and worthwhile things we'd shared, the reasons I'd fallen in love with and married her.  I'm really hoping that's most of what's there in the years to come and the bad times fade into the background.  I don't want to forget them entirely, if nothing else as a reminder of what I don't want in my life again.  At the same time, there were a lot of good things about Ariel that I do miss, and that if I ever do get open to looking for a partner and companion that I'd hope to find.