Musings

[Winnie]

  Your husband is dead, now what? You may know that your partner is dying. Even welcome it for them if they have been suffering. But with their last breath so much else dies with them. Your life plan, your family's future as you imagined it, alarmingly altered. Your new life totally unrecognizable and foreign. Family traditions will no longer be the same.

  Your friends and those around you support and surround you and your family with love. They will never know the suffering you experience as a widow just like I can never know how it feels to my children to have lost their father at 49.

The constant presence, that life force that forged with yours to create your family is extinguished.

  If you are lucky, you may catch a glimpse, a kiss, the smell of him in a dream or those quiet moments before you are fully awake. When your eyes haven't opened to another day without him. Memories and your children with him are the only thing you have with them now. The other parent is gone. That snoring lump with  morning breath and scratchy beard. The guy who brought you coffee in bed. Your friend you went for a random drive with. The person whose footprints were next to yours in the sand. The spouse you worried about bills with. Gone.

  You were a couple. All of your friends are still couples. They can't imagine the aching isolation you feel as the single friend not by choice, nor would you want them to feel this particular brand of loneliness. How you can feel so utterly alone and adrift in a room full of laughter and people?

There are graduations, holidays, birthdays, weddings, joyous yes, but haunted by the absence of the one person you want most by your side.

  The couch seems oversized. The space you once shared too large. Things you once enjoyed suddenly have lost their glow. Why pick up that book, watch that ball game you wanted to catch, listen to that music when your PERSON is gone?

  People will tell you it gets better with time. You put on a good face, talk about other things, let anniversaries pass by remembered only by you and your love. Hopefully you have children and people you love and live for to get you up in the morning. The truth is, three years later it is no easier. I miss my children's father. The ache in my heart for them is constant as I know they struggle still to mourn and honor him. He is not here to help them through it. We cannot share our pain with him.

  You go to work, out with friends, attend to daily chores. All of these a welcome distraction from the hollow space that your partner once occupied. That space cannot be filled. You may try to fill it with a cocktail or a pet, an antidepressant or some other temporary fix. Then you wake up and realize that empty space is now part of your new reality. It follows you as you go through your day, work, breathe, laugh, cry. It's there when you are driving in the car and a song you loved echoes through the cavern in your heart. It's there as you get that millisecond of excitement to tell him that news, joke, tidbit about the kids and walk into that empty place where he used to be. It's like having a bucket of cold water thrown at your face.

  I don't have any answers or thoughts on how to get through it, except I don't think you CAN get "through it". You have to accept your new reality. Make peace with the fact that that empty space where he once was is just always going to be there. How could it not be? Know that no matter how much other people try to understand, only another person who has lost their life's partner can relate to your lack of ability to "move on".

  Writing down my thoughts in words is therapeutic. One of the things I've realized jotting down my feelings since Sean died is there IS no word I know in the English language for how I feel now.