It's a small world

I'm a ghost.

I haunt the 1620 square feet where I lived with Doug. Where I loved Doug. Where I still love Doug.

Where Doug loved me.

But Doug doesn't love me anymore, because he's dead. Is he a ghost, too? If so, why isn't he showing himself to me? Talking to me? Visiting me in my dreams?

Ghosts are invisible; so am I. I've been invisible, in a sense, for some time: fat people are (ironically enough) invisible - fat women even more so; women over 50 are definitely invisible. But grief has managed to make me even more invisible than I already was. The vast majority of people avert their eyes and ears to the pain of reality: death came for my love, and may very well come for yours too. That's why they try to say things designed to make me less vocal about my pain - it's not only that they desperately want me to stop hurting (although I know that they do want that); it's also that they don't want to hear it and internalize it. Subconsciously, they're trying to put a circle of protection around their own psyches so that they don't have to feel what I'm feeling. They say things like, "I can't imagine what you're going through," but that's not true. Human beings are inherently creative: they can imagine it. They don't want to.

No one wants to face the reality that death can strike their love at any moment.

I don't blame them. God knows I understand not wanting to face it, but I don't have much choice: it's right there every time I make coffee for just me, every time I look at his Vols coffee mug that will never be used again, every time I want a hug and he's not here to hold me, every time I look at his empty spot on the sofa, every time I see a new recording on the DVR for an episode of some series that he watched without me, every time I walk past our bed. The bed where I'll never sleep with him again. The bed where it's looking more and more like I'll never sleep again at all.

This is how it is for ghosts, yes? Trapped on the earthly plane, longing to connect with our loved one(s), but unable to reach them. Unable to DO anything but feel the sorrow of our loss. SO MUCH pain and longing and sadness. Invisibility. No one bears witness to my pain. No one holds me as I cry and scream. I scream into the silence, and no one hears. I curl up on the floor, rocking and wailing and crying, and no one sees. I am unseen, unheard, unnoticed. I am alone. Sure, there are people who love me, but without Doug - without the one person whose life WAS my life - I am completely alone. And that's never going to change.

If not for the animals, I could literally disappear and it would be days before anyone noticed. I AM disappearing. Every day, I become less: smaller, harder, more tightly wound, unable to do anything but feel my pain. Every day, I'm a little less Kathleen and a little more jagged shards of what used to be an entire person who felt warmth, and joy, and amusement, and happiness, and hope. I don't feel those things anymore. Now, I feel anguish, and terror, and inescapable loneliness, and exhaustion. And small. I feel so, SO small. If I keep getting smaller every day, I assume that eventually I'll disappear. I would welcome that.

When a sufficiently massive star dies, it collapses under its own gravity until it becomes a black hole - a cosmic entity so heavy and so dense that not even light can escape it. What happens, do you think, to a human being when she collapses under her own gravity? Certainly, I already feel as though I'll never emit light again, so what happens when I finish collapsing? Will I cease to exist altogether, as I hope I will?

Or will I continue to haunt this house, screaming and crying alone, longing for all of eternity just to be with my husband?