I’m not in denial.  I know Chuck is dead.  I feel it…have felt it…in every part of my body since 2 years ago, April 21.  He’s gone.  Gone, gone, gone.

And yet, I swear that there is still a part of me that doesn’t believe it.  That can’tbelieve it.  How can he be gone when he and I were so connected?  How can it be that I’m walking on this earth, just Alison, without his name said in the same breath?  We were Chuck and Alison.  That couple who, after 24 years, were still in love with one another, who still kissed and hugged and whose faces lit up when the other entered the room.  How can that be over?

2 years.

I didn’t think I could live 2 months without him and I don’t know that I’m actually living but I’m still alive these 2 years later, as insane a thought as that is to me. 

I don’t necessarily believe in an afterlife.  Heaven.  Hell.  In between.  Other dimensions.  I’m open to the possibility but even if there is something, it isn’t good enough for me because it won’t be (I can’t imagine that it would) what he and I had here on this earth.   Our spirits may never connect after I die.   So I don’t have a belief that brings me any comfort. 

In some part of my brain I think that there is that grain of a thought that he’s somewhere here still. We’re just apart for now and I’ll find him again and we’ll continue on as before.  In our years together we’d spend time apart, whether it was when he was in the military, deploying somewhere, or when I visited family or friends, knowing that we’d be back with one another in a timely manner.  I guess my heart still needs to believe that so that the reality of his death doesn’t crash down on me and into me and flood my system with such agony that I can’t continue standing.

He was my husband, my lover, my everything.  And I just don’t understand how it will ever be okay that he is missing from me.