1 Year, 6 Months - Inertia

I cried today
Sadness has weighed me down
I don’t want to move
I was up Friday and Saturday with no sleep
I feel nauseous
I don’t care about working
Moving takes so much effort and I don’t even care if I do move

1 Year, 5 months - Signs

I just miss you honey. I feel your hug in the wind and it comforts me. I think of you and see a large daisy sign. I wish you were by my side and I see a bus with a bee.

1 Year, 4 Months - Praying to the dead

Honey, can’t you help? Why isn’t it working? I promise I’ll lead a fulfilling life and not just stay inside, predominately in bed. Help me honey.

5 Years, 7 Months - The Holidays

The holidays suck. I just talked to a friend that is a young widow without kids. She was expecting dinner at the in-laws as usual. However, her phone calls were ignored and then she finally got a cold reception when the sister answered. She now realizes she is spending Thanksgiving alone.

Losing a spouse usually means losing more people as well. Who are the in-laws and the stepchildren after death? Legally they are not related to you any longer. Not only have you lost the person that touches every aspect of your life but an entire branch of your family tree is severed. My brother-in-law called yesterday. I was expecting an invite as well but it was just a message to say 'Have a nice Thanksgiving'.
Sure, I have made plans for the past holidays. I don't just wait to be invited. I went to Mexico and ate lobster with two widows in their 20s the first year. I have hosted several holiday dinners and went to a friend's house one year. Nevertheless, there remains the void. You are now family-less. You are no longer married. Basically you are single. Your in-laws remain family at will. Your extended family spends the time with their immediate family - children, in-laws, and spouse. Another holiday season and I will be alone. This year will be Thanksgiving dinner take-out again. I do eat in restaurants alone all the time now. Yet to go out to dinner alone on Thanksgiving or even cook for one is too pathetic. Better yet to pretend it is just another day. Some years are better than others. It is not a straight line forward.
Tomorrow is the anniversary of the day he proposed.

1 Year, 3 Months - Getting through the days, emptiness

Another day …
I take off my pants and drop them in the hamper. I pull the t-shirt over my head and let it fall on top of the pants. When I am sitting peeing I see the antenna of a small roach. It is time for me to buy more roach hotels.
I crawl in bed in old panties with a maxi overnight pad and a tank top. I lay on top of the Pemberton wool blanket. I believe the clean sheets are wedged between the headboard and mattress. The other side of the bed is tangled with clean laundry. I have not made my bed in months. I arrange the pile of pillows and lay my feet near the window. For unknown reasons, I sleep with my head at the footboard now.
I hear the crickets and think of you sweating in the sun. You uncovered a large cricket mound digging a ditch by the driveway. I never knew they nested underground like ants. A swarm of crickets flew and swirled around us. I did not hear them in the garage afterwards. However, they crickets are back now. I hear them in the patio.
We wanted a driveway that would park two cars. You wanted to cement the strip of flower beds that separated our driveway from the neighbors grass. I wanted the flower bed as an area to plant tall bushes that would block the view of the neighbors and close off our home. I wanted to cement over the grass. However, the grass was the only part of the yard you liked. We compromised half the flower bed strip and half the grass for the driveway extension. You dug down three feet to get rid of the weeds and poor dirt so I could plant the bushes. We purchased the plants in Cambria on our anniversary get-away and carried them home in the backseat. The trunk was filled with cases of wine you bought while wine tasting. The smell of dirt and Mexican sage enveloped us on our drive home. Two plants died after awhile. The other three grow and spread. The sound of crickets reminds me of you.
My life is led by others now. I don’t do what I want. The phone pages me all day. I work for others. My weekends are planned for me. I have no joy. I must hide to be left alone. I wake when others tell me, I follow their dictates by day, and I eat a little when I remember. I mostly smoke and drink Diet Cokes. I resign to sleep some nights. I protest other nights and stay up so I am free to do what I want, free from phone calls, rebelling against the drudgery of my afternoons. I think of you. Did you send me those birds, those signs? Is the song on the radio your words to me?
I am not as sad anymore. I never cry. I only wail occasionally. The pain is buried too deep for tears and requires an emptying, releasing, a minimum of wailing and moaning. I do not cry. I do not care.
Slowly I resign myself to the drudgery, the emptiness, the loneliness. I accustom myself to daily dreariness and to walking with a hollow feeling. The hollowness is like hunger without satisfaction. It is more of a mild hunger, rather than starvation, as in waiting a long time for dinner after forgetting to eat breakfast and lunch. Maybe this is why I eat less. Why I forget to eat. I am getting used to the emptiness and forget sometimes it is only a hunger for food, which I can meet. I am so used to a longing, the forsaking, the loss of love returned, of love satisfied, of love seen and felt. I must forget that some of the ache is merely hunger for food.

2 Years, Twenty Days - Songs, Alone

One verse keeps running through my head, "I don't know what to do, cause you know I still love you". I sing it over and over to myself like a jewelry box opening and closing its lid with the lonely dancer spinning in circles. I have done three rewinds before I realize it.
The toilet keeps running. I know it is the flap. Isn't anyone going to fix it? Do I call a plumber? Do I go to Home Depot? Do I tinker with it? When did I become so inept?

1 Year, 6 Months - Do Not Recognize Self

When I see the old lady in the mirror I know it is not definitive. I can see, just under the surface, where I am hiding. Just under the surface but I can not quite reach her. Nevertheless, I tell the eyes that look back at me not to worry, not to give up hope. I am still there. It is not over.

5 years, 7 months, 1 day - Bittersweet Memories

I listen to music that reminds me of you. There is a smile on my face. There are tears crossing my eyelashes in multiple rivulets across the width and length of my cheeks. I sing. I want to dance. Wanting to dance puts a vision of you in my mind. I would be walking out of the kitchen. You would be on the sofa. A song would start my body swaying. You would tell me to ‘do it’. The recollection brings back that same full stretch smile. Slowly I would twist with my arms in front of me, elbows tucked against my sides, my hands curled in balls, a slow dip of the alternating knee as my arms chugged to the left and then slowly to the right. Excitedly you would say again to do it. However, it was a slow dance. Each dip to the side was a little lower and then my heel opposite would rise and lift my foot up on my toes. There were a few more twists to go. You anticipated the dip that finally lifted my foot a few inches off the floor. Caddyshack was nearly a religion. Boys and men would quote the movie in impersonated voices. I did the dance, the gopher dance. He loved my gopher dance.

1 year, 8 months - Do the dead grieve?

For the first time I wondered if you were mourning too? Do you miss me as much as I miss you? Do you miss everyone? Can you see us but miss touching us, holding us, laughing with us, talking to us? Are you grieving too? I was struck by my selfishness. To think you were fine alone.

1 Year, 3 Months: Need, Living is a Chore

I curled in a ball and wailed. I was by myself and I wailed. I can not sleep. It is too late to take sleeping pills.

I can not give you up.
I need you.
I need you to hold me.
I need you to support me.
I need you to be the same.
I need your comfort now.
I can not wait anymore.
I want you so bad.

I cry and it comes from so deep inside. I need you. I need you. I am not O.K. You were my life. I hate this life. It is pointless. It is a job. Something I have to do. Eventually I have to get out of bed. I have to work and do errands. I have to feed myself everyday when nothing satisfies, nothing is appealing. My ribs shutter up and down as I sob. My nose runs on the pillow. There is no relief from the pain. I do not want to go on. I just go through the day as if it is a chore I must accomplish. I procrastinate and try to avoid the chore. I sleep in, I go without eating, and I drift. Yet there is no choice eventually. My brother and his wife will find me. My niece will expect me to get up eventually. She will want to eat so I will eat.
The drugs store the pain away a bit but it is still there. It is a huge, raw, empty hole with sorrow floating in its darkness. I think of you, so far away now. My love for you so unfulfilled. I am craving to be held, touched. I would love just an hour, just an hour to kiss you, to kiss your closed eyelids, to run my palm down between the muscles of your chest, to run my fingers through your soft hair, to smell you. The smell of you, cologne, sweat, Neutrogena T-Gel shampoo, your deodorant, your smell. I only need an hour to feel your weight on top of me.
I can not accept the fact that I can only be with someone else, a stranger to me today. I want to be faithful. Not out of respect, not out of obligation. I want to be faithful because my soul loves you. You are my soul mate. I can not understand why you had to die. I can not understand how people survive this? How do they handle the pain?
Come home to me or take me to you.

5 weeks - Scared, Panic

I have bad feelings when I go to do some laundry. It is such a normal routine that I did hundreds of times in this house, with this machine, with you in the living room. Now it is just I. I am terrified when I think of you those last days in the hospital. I am scared that you are gone. Can it be forever? I have been planning a trip with your daughter using your ticket to see your niece graduate. I wish it were you and me or the two of us and the girls. I don’t feel like you are gone and when I try to think of it I feel panic rising up inside me that I have to stop before it reaches my throat. Where are you baby?

5 weeks - Regret

I read your autopsy report today and wailed. I thought of your shoulder injury and could picture the thin line running vertically when they described it. I could see your healed midsection scar from a childhood appendectomy like me. I was at peace to know there was so much cancer everywhere. I felt less regret for saying yes to stop the care aimed at curing you. Still, I wonder if we stopped chemo too soon. Was there any hope? Could we have at least gotten you to the ocean? I think now how you kept asking me to go to the water - the ocean, a pool, a hydrotherapy bath. How I could not help you. How I kept promising you ‘maybe tomorrow’. You were unable to speak. You had not spoken in maybe a week. When your family asked me how long it had been since you could talk I could not answer them. I did not notice that much because we could still talk without words. I know you. You know me. I know your looks and what they mean. Plus you had incorporated basic sign language symbols we had learned from our one-year-old nephew visiting you. We also used scuba diving signals. The sign to surface became the sign to raise the bed. To dive together side-by-side meant for me to come closer to the bed. Sign language for milk was a request for Ensure. The sign for rain meant to pour ice water on your head. I knew you wanted to get in the water when you made the sign language for fish on your last day. When I said maybe tomorrow, you said ‘oh well’. As if you knew there were no more tomorrows. Did you say this with your eyes, a shrug, a tilt of the head? I don’t recall because to me it was the same as if you spoke the words. I think of holding your head to my chest as you left, of telling you I would look after your girls, and I loved you. I said ‘I love you’ with such deep sadness as your heart rate continued to drop and you stopped breathing. I felt you go. When I looked a the heart monitor the flat line was eating the mountains like a Pac Man. I am lonely. Yet, not as lonely as before I met you. I am more at peace now. Now, that someone has loved me unconditionally, without fear, without jealousy, without their selves first. You loved me first and then your self and I am at peace. I am sure my loneliness will grow without you ever coming back home. I will be so lonely to go places without you especially the places we already had tickets for, the places we had planned, that we had scheduled to take off work, all the places we had on our list. How I miss you pumpkin. How I wish we had years and years. I fear I am sick too. I wonder what I will do. I am scared. How scared you must have been.

5 weeks - I thought of you today. I cried.

I thought of you today when I saw the bird on the picket fence. I thought of you today and cried in the bathtub remembering our third date. I cried because I miss you. I cried for the regrets. I cried because I want to travel with you and have you hold me. I wear your wedding ring on my finger. I made a list of things to do and they include showering and crying. I feel you with me all the time. I feel you catch a peek at me through the eye of a bird and hug me with the wind.

3 Years - Expectations

I just need to tell someone. Maybe no one will hear. Maybe no one will read. Maybe I am naive. But someone hear me. No one hears me.

They applaud the steps they see as forward and ignore with mild contempt and frustration the stagnation. I don’t only move forward. I am in a rip tide with my mouth barely breathing, pulling out and under to the sea. You only see when I make a movement towards shore. I know to swim parallel to shore. I know it is what I need. But, the water is cool and warm and wraps me. I can go with the tide without so much strain. I am tired from fighting it. The constant fight and I am no closer to shore. Swim parallel? Swim and swim and pull, arm over arm, turning my head for breaths, keep going. But I’ll only be the same distance I am now from shore just a bit upstream, perhaps downstream. Can’t I just let the tide take me, take it’s time? It will calm in time. The tide will lose its power. It will wane and I will just be floating in the sea. It will be harder for you to see me from shore. But, I will be there, safe in time. Then I can swim without so much effort. It will be refreshing, invigorating. Why is it necessary to struggle so much now? I will be strong enough when the rip tide losses its power and then I can move towards shore.

3 Years - Reminders Everywhere

They all have each other.


I see him everywhere

I think of him all day

Everything is him or us

Just to hear, ‘I am on my way home'

Grief Walking - A Coming of Middle Age Story

The music was immobilizing me. Song after song of love and loss and moving on. Some of the worst ones from the early years.
I guess that’s what I’ll call it now, the early years, the start of the grief, the start of the end of my life.