There is a cellular memory to the way I now feel. The grief when Al died almost broke me. But it was different. Al had been gone for 3.5 years. His body was just still here. Mike was here and present and so much Mike – until he suddenly wasn’t. We knew that he would die. We knew the cancer would take him – but we figured he had at least another good year, as well as he had been doing. We didn’t expect it to happen now – and we didn’t expect it to come with no warning.
There is so much undone. So many questions unanswered. So much time lost. So much not completed. So many late-night talks and rides in the country and pranks pulled and dreams realized that never happened. So much life yet to be lived.
I came home after the memorial service and just did not want to start again. I know this place. I know the soul-sucking silence of a home where two people laughed and loved and squabbled. I know the emptiness of a favorite chair. The silence when it’s only myself watching TV, figuring out what’s for dinner, needing desperately to discuss a million tiny bits of minutiae that only we know. I know this place of grief and I do not want to be here.
I am sick of tears. Someone once told me there are a certain number of tears for every loss. No. These tears are not numbered. This bucket is too vast and endless for numbers. I do not wish to see the bottom. I don’t want to cry them.
After Al died, I was a shell of myself. I functioned but I wasn’t whole. Mike gave me back not only my life, but a completeness. He was my cape, my wings, my coat against the cold. We had plans and dreams – our list grew by the day. And like Mike told me in 2016 – we would be together until we went to the dirt. We just expected that time to be 20 years or more from now.
I keep asking myself what Mike would do. How Mike would cope. He always told me he simply wouldn’t cope if I passed first. But I’m pretty sure he would have. And he would have started with the basics of life. He would also have sought, and accepted, help from others. And I’m lousy at that – and I never want to do it. I’m going to have to learn how.
I have been so busy since Mike passed. Busy in ways that aren’t normal for me. I’ve cleaned every surface I walk by. Done a hundred little things. Kept endless lists in my head. Don’t want to do anything that wastes time. I can’t stop moving once I get going. That was Mike. All day long, every single day. And that’s the energy I’m going to need to run our life on my own.
I don’t have any doubts about keeping our world here going. That’s just work, and I enjoy that. My doubt is in keeping ME going. I want Mike. And he isn’t coming home from a hunting trip. He hasn’t just gone to town. He isn’t puttering down in the barn. He is gone from my sight. I can feel him – but it’s not the same as holding him or joking with him.
When Mike came back into my life, I flat sparkled. Everyone who knew me was elated for me, for us. My friends who never met him said they loved him sight unseen. Anyone who could make me look like that, who could make me laugh like that, was golden in their eyes. And now, my sparkle is gone. And Mike would be so pissed. He would tell me to get on with it. And damn it, I’m trying.
Small steps are being made. I no longer wake up in tears. I don’t wake up frantically searching for Mike. I am sleeping in the whole bed, not just a tiny corner of it. I’m starting to at least reheat food at home, though I have yet to cook a meal. I’ve donated a lot of his medical supplies. I’m starting the paperwork, what I call “the business of death”, and it’s aggravating as hell.
So this one’s it. My one and only grief post. The sadness and the vast emptiness is my own journey to walk. Nothing and no one can help me with that, and it just feels like whining to share it. I just have to force myself to do what nothing in me wants to do – learn to keep my life going without Mike.
I know dozens of women who have lost their husbands. This is the journey we all walk. This emptiness when we thought there would always be togetherness. It’s not productive to ask why – that answer will never come. There’s only walking/crawling/creeping forward, one inch at a time.
So many people have asked me if I was moving back to Houston. No. My life there is done. I want a smaller world. I want this world of caring, and the grace that I can show in returning the kindnesses. I want the world that Mike and I were building – the home we were making. I want our joy.
And I guess now it’s up to me to find it for both of us – at 62.
At 62 