I've had other widows tell me that it can get a little worse before it gets better. It is getting worse for me lately, and I think that is because the initial utter shock has worn off. Yet the unreality has not, in fact it seems even more unreal now than it did in that first week. It's harder than ever to accept that he is dead, and I don't know why.
The first week, even the first two weeks, I think I was still able to maintain a distance from all of it. I was so numb I couldn't think of anything, I knew he was gone but for some reason it wasn't fully registered in my brain. It's the same now, but the loss feels a thousand times worse lately. I look at his photos and have a meltdown. I look at his things and do the same. Tonight I looked at the products that had been sitting on the Amazon wishlist, one that we shared, and began sobbing uncontrollably because he will never be able to sit down and read the how-to books he'd marked, or learn the new programming tricks, or get that cool tea maker he was researching.
It seems that now half the time I cry for my loss, and the other half I cry because he can never experience these things, and because the people who knew him will never be able to interact with him again.
Sometimes I've asked myself what would he have done, if the situation were reversed and I'd been the one to go suddenly and without warning? We'd mentioned it a few times, casually, and he was always pretty adamant that he'd expect me to go on and do great things. I told him, no, I'm going with you. If you go first, I'm going with you, and he'd shake his head. He wanted me to be independent and strong. I'd like to think that if he were here, in place of me, he would be carrying on with a much calmer demeanor. He'd carry on with our plans, he'd live life to the fullest. That was what I'd have wanted him to do.
I don't know why I find it so profoundly difficult to contemplate that my life will go on.
I spent time at a bookstore tonight, recharging myself and looking for texts that might be helpful. In the past few days I've been building my reading list, the first of which was one of the books that was transformative in my hub's life: The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. I had read it when we first met because it was a tremendously important book to him, but it didn't click with me as he would have liked. Lately, though, I feel a need to reread this and hope to begin to have a better understanding of how my husband could maintain his calm, his quiet mind, his feeling of peace. I feel like it will draw me closer to him, and maybe it will ease my mind somewhat as well.
19 Days, my love. I miss you.
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