I got Ariel's ashes scattered on her birthday, October 25th.  At first I thought it'd be just one place where that'd get done, but three others came to mind and kept coming up.  One was the spot where we'd renewed our vows on our 10-year wedding anniversary.  Another was the area in the back yard where we'd buried a lot of the pets we'd had over the years.  A third...well....that was her place.  Those all went OK.  It was sad, but at the same time I could also connect with the good memories in those places and good things about her.  I couldn't help hoping that connecting with those memories might help her move on.  I know they helped me with seeing all this as more than just a horrific loss.

The one that was hard was the spot on the mountains, the one I'd originally planned to go to.  Getting there was harder than when I'd gone up in July.  That time, I had no problem driving to the spot where I'd have to park to get there.  This time, even with a GPS device, I drove past it several times.  Thankfully, the rest of the hike down there wasn't too bad.  It could've been a lot worse, especially as the weather was threatening.  Rain would've made that hike really trecherous, as it's all through wooded areas with lots of rocks and deadfall.  There's no path to get there, either.  You just have to know where it is.  Fortunately, I made it down there easily enough.  When I was there, I did the things that'd come to mind and just spoke from my heart for a bit.  Once that was all done, I scattered her ashes.  It reminded me of the first time she took me to that spot, and that made it hit that that was when our relationship had first come together.  It seemed kind of fitting that it'd close out there, too.

What was really hard and strange was when I packed up to leave.  Walking away, it felt like something was trying to drag me back.  The whole way back up to the car, it felt like I was dragging a pickup truck behind me.  I don't know if that was just my unconscious resistance to admitting and accepting that she's really gone.  I haven't been able to shake the idea that part of it was her not wanting me to go, not wanting to be left or forgotten.  That would make sense, especially if her suicide hasn't worked out at all the way she thought it might.  I'm not in bad shape, but halfway up to the car I was just staggering, and it wasn't getting any easier.  By the time I got back up there, I was not only staggering but wheezing, as if I'd just covered five miles pulling a tank behind me...uphill.  It wasn't until I got back up there that it felt safe to look back.  For the rest of the day, it felt like I'd been hit in the solar plexus by a sledgehammer.

The last couple of weeks have been rough.  I'm not sleeping too well, it's hard to concentrate, my mood's down or irritable more.  It feels like I've gone back to where I was a couple months after she died.  I think I'd rather badly underestimated how hard it would hit me, scattering her ashes.  I'm just hoping that I'll be able to recover faster from that than I did getting the news of her death.