There are moments when I think I am happy, moments when I am with friends or with family and we are laughing and smiling at a joke that someone made, but then those moments end. I go home and as day turns into night, I am consumed by unexplainable sadness, something that can't be ignored or forgotten because it is etched into my heart as if it were a tattoo. I lie in my bed, next to the empty space where you should be and I think about all the things that I wish I could say to you. Nights were my favorite time with you, when the chaotic busy that came with the day had faded away and we had nothing left to do but lie together and get lost in conversation. Now it is in the night that I realize I am many things, but mostly I am just empty and lonely and missing you always. It is in the night when I am forced to reconcile with the fact that healing from your death will take the rest of my lifetime, however long or short it might be.
Someone told me that I would start healing after your celebration of life service because that would be when it began to feel real. This person meant well, but they were wrong. So very wrong. Healing doesn't start then, instead that's when the grief really sets in because everyone around you heads back to their own life and you no longer have a distraction keeping you from thinking about your nightmare. It feels real, but I continue to have moments where I forget reality and continue to think that you might just walk in. The service really did nothing, but confirm what I already knew, it would have been easier to lose my own life than to have lost you, the life I loved more than my own, the service showed me that it's hard to wake up from a nightmare when you aren't even asleep.
I guess that's not true. I guess it did one other thing, it served to show me that although I had experienced loss and grief, I had, up until all of this happened, never experienced the kind of grief that shatters your entire life. I did not know what it was like to wish that the floor would open up and swallow you. To experience a loneliness so great that you become an empty shell of the person that you were. I had no idea what it was like to go from living to simply surviving, to feel as if you barely have any air left inside of your lungs because your grief is literally suffocating you. I had never experienced a grief so intense that you wake up in the morning still exhausted. I didn't know what it was like to burst into tears in the middle of the grocery store just picking up a container of ice cream. I didn't know what it was like to be unable to breathe, not wanting to breathe, and yet breathing anyway. I did not understand this type of grief and I wish I didn't understand it now.
Sometimes I wish I could trade shoes with someone. I wish that I could trade the shoes of the young widow, the shoes of the young widow with two small children for another pair, a happier pair. A pair in which you are still standing beside me. I wish this and yet, if anyone were to ask me, I know that I would say with the utmost conviction that I would never trade being your wife. The only wife that you ever had, will ever have. I hate these shoes and everything that comes with them and yet, simultaneously I feel like the luckiest woman alive. I feel like the luckiest woman because I was able to love and to hold you. I just wish I could hold you again....even if just for a moment.
I am buying a home. It has a piece of you in it, but I am not happy about it. I am not necessarily unhappy, but I am not happy. It's something we should be doing together and the truth is that I don't truly feel like it will ever be home, because you won't be there and you were my home. You were my heart and I don't think I will ever feel like I am truly home again. There are no words to appropriately encompass what that feels like. What losing you has felt like.
I guess the truth is, I am never really happy, I simply have moments where I'm a little less sad than others.
I love you. I miss you. Forever.
Always,
Jess
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