Do you ever feel like the life that you had, and the person you were with (who died), is just slipping further and further away?
Does it ever feel like you’re driving down the road, some long and unknown highway, with no destination or reason, and when you look in your rearview mirror – that life that you knew just gets smaller and smaller?
Do you ever become terrified of the day when that life, that person, will just completely disappear altogether?
Or is that just me?
I fight every single day, to keep my husband alive.
Maybe it’s because his death was so sudden, so there was no “fighting” before it happened.
It just happened, and I had no say, no warning, no clue that life was about to be something else.
Maybe it’s because we didn’t get that chance, that honor, to have our family, to have kids.
Maybe if our kids were a thing that existed, then I would know always that their very existence would keep him alive.
Maybe it’s because he doesn’t have a lot of family, and the family he does have, most of them don’t talk with me or keep me in their lives. Maybe there are only one or two people in his family that I can talk to at all, and there is a lot of sadness and regret attached to anything related to his family.
Maybe it’s because as the months and the years and the days go on, there are less and less people I can talk to about my husband. That window of people who don’t give me that sad look that says: “She’s talking about him again?”, gets smaller and smaller each second on this earth.
Maybe it’s because as more time passes, the more upset I become at how unfair life was to my dear husband. Maybe I will never be okay with the idea that he got screwed in childhood, screwed in adulthood, and then screwed out of having a family, growing old, having love and marriage for more than 4 years, and having LIFE.
Maybe I feel this intense fierceness, to live for the both of us, and to carry him with me in whatever ways I can figure out how to do that.
Maybe this is just what death is.
Maybe this is just what real, raw grief looks like, when you love someone with every breath.
Maybe it will just be this way and feel this way forever.
Maybe this is the price of love, and being loved.
I don’t know the maybes.
I don’t know the why’s.
What I know, is that it is VITAL to me, in the same way that oxygen is vital,
that my beautiful husband is never forgotten.
Yes, people will forget him.
Some already have.
Yes, I know that his soul and his being living forever is not this important to anyone else on earth, but me.
And maybe that is exactly WHY it is SO important.
It is my job.
It is my honor.
It is my responsibility.
It is my reason.
As his widow.
As his forever love.
To keep him with me,
to keep him with the world.
To never stop saying his name,
or feeling his presence.
To live and to love, and to keep him beside me,
through all of the people and connections and moments that he keeps providing me.
To allow joy inside, when it appears,
and to let the sadness in and out,
when it appears.
To live,
and to let him live beside me,
even in Death.
If I don’t,
then that means,
Death was stronger.
Death will win.
And I will never let that happen.
My husband got screwed in life.
I will NOT let him get screwed in death.
I will love him forever,
and I will keep telling the world,
that it matters.
