My husband died a month ago. He'd been sick for a long time and while his death was not surprising (cancer deaths rarely are), the speed with which the disease took him at the end was unexpected. He wasn't only my spouse, he was my best friend, my lover, teacher, mentor, right arm, strength, he was my everything.
Now I am in the throes of grief. It is like an unseen animal that is constantly gnawing away at me. I don't want to feel like this, I want my best friend back. I want to see him sitting in his favorite chair, playing his acoustic and working out the lyrics to a new song. I want to smell the heat of his skin and I want to touch him all over. I want to roll over in our bed and night and hear the rhythm of his breathing. I want to talk to him, to tell him about what I read about Earth Day, about the new pictures of the grandkids, how the new garden looked after the recent rains.
I want to make him a favorite meal and watch him enjoy it. I want to hear his voice, tell him he needs to comb his hair, hear him say that he loves me one more time. I want to feel safe, content and loved again. I don't want to feel this way.
I have never been a weak person but now I feel completely helpless. Nothing in my life seems to matter to me right now and I know that if he saw me in this shape, he would give me down the road for feeling so sorry for myself. "I'm dead!", he would say, "Get off your ass and do something positive. All this negative energy is no good for anybody! I loved you so much and this is what you are doing with that love? Come on, woman!" I can hear him now. And he would say that with such love that I would immediately want to jump up and do exactly what he said.
Only I can't. I am completely paralyzed by my emotions right now. Can't sleep at night, can't remember anything, can't stop crying, can't stop trying to make some, any sense of all of this. He'd be right, too, about the negative energy. I can feel it consuming me inside, leaving ashes instead of that fire the burned in me when he was alive. How did our perfect life fall completely apart like this? Why did he have to get cancer? Why did he have to die? Why not me? He deserved to live more than me. He's the one who was special. Why am I still here?
I hear sometimes that there should be a special Hell for those who commit heinous crimes, those unspeakable deeds that shock and appall most of us. I don't think I ever really believed in Hell at all but now I am living in that special Hell that is reserved for those who lose the ones they love most. I committed no crime. My only sin, if it is in fact a sin, was that I loved a man too much. Is that why I am being punished? Because I worshipped at the altar of a mortal man?
These thoughts that run through my head now are disjointed and confusing. One minute I am almost blind with grief and at another I am overwhelmed with feelings of love for someone who will never again hold my hand, or kiss my lips.
I miss Dave.
“You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this.”
