I don’t know what makes one day, one moment, more impossible than another.  Grief is just that way.  For me, it isn’t a matter of grief suddenly showing itself;  it’s more a matter of at any one moment I’m better able to keep it under my skin as opposed to right on top.  It isn’t less or more than;  it’s just under or on top of.

Today, Veterans Day, I couldn’t keep it under my skin and nerves were crawling all over the place. Nausea, anxiety, the works.  It didn’t show, I don’t think, but it was so very there.

I was always so proud of Chuck’s time in service.  The first time I saw him in his dress blues, I almost swooned right on the street.   But I loved him best in his BDU’s (camouflage).  With his moustache…oh, he was a sight for this girl’s eyes…

So, yeah, today.  And grief.  Every day, and grief.

I wish to scream and howl my rage and horror to the skies until my vocal chords are rendered numb with exhaustion.  Numb not only from exhaustion but because there are no more words to describe what my life is like without him next to me and the agony of the rest of my life missing him.

I wish to take my nails (which are too short now because I started biting my nails again after he died), and rake them along my skin, drawing matter that will not only be blood but my soul bleeding out the searing pain that resides in my muscle and sinew and bone.

I wish to tear at my hair, which has grown in now from that long ago day after his death when I shaved my head.  Tear at it and shred it from its’ roots and rip into it.

If I could, I would grab at the cleaver that continually chops my inner self into pieces and parts and hammer at all that stands around me, pounding forth the fury that inhabits my body and heart.

But life continues on, doesn’t it?  Whether we wish it to or not.  And I must function because I am, to my shock, still alive.  I hate that I am but I’m not going to kill myself, so apparently I must make a life for myself.  So each day, with these feelings raging inside of me, I get in my car and I drive wherever it is that I’m supposed to drive.  I don’t attempt to push these feelings down, but I have to function so they go undercover, so to speak.   Always there, just not evident to the common observer.

And today…today the outer layer of skin gave way to the march of memory and future and present.

He is missing from me.  Oh, my dear husband, I wish for your arms around me, your chest to rest my head against, your breath to breathe with mine, your body to wrap around mine as we sleep, your solidness to stand beside and with me.

You were my knight, my hero, my lover, my dearest everything.

On this Veterans Day, I salute you and all that you were in life, to me and so many~