We weren't finished

My beloved husband,

One month ago today, our family and friends gathered to bear witness to your big, beautiful life - to your big, beautiful heart. I know it happened, and there are flashes of it that I can recall, but honestly, I think I was in a fugue state for most of it: it's all a blur.

It feels like it happened yesterday, and it feels like it happened forever ago.

Since then, the world has gone insane. The love and companionship and hugs that are typically offered to support someone in grief? I can't get those, because we're all essentially on lockdown for the foreseeable future. So I'm forced to make do with zoom calls and phone calls and texting and reading grief blogs and connecting with other widows and widowers on Facebook and Reddit, and it's just not enough.

I've gone insane, too. I cry all the time. I talk to you, but you don't ever answer. I spend my days aimlessly thinking about you, and how much I miss you, and how lonely it is in this house alone, and how scared I am about... everything. You wouldn't recognize me. Your Kathleen - the planner, the independent woman who took years to stop resisting your attempts to help at anything because "it's good; I can do it myself," the career woman who was so good at the job she loved so much, the voracious reader and watcher of obscure documentaries - she's gone. In her place is a woman who is so broken and so lost that you would probably run in the other direction, and I wouldn't blame you: I wish I could run away from me, too.

I feel so completely alone, despite many assertions to the contrary, and that's because I am. And I would be equally alone even if I could see my friends every day, and even if Peggy and Dan were here this weekend like they'd planned: because the places where I'm alone are in my grief, and in my love for you. And no one can be in either of those places with me; our love is something we alone created. Yes, there are people who witnessed some of it, but only you and I lived in our love. That's what made it special: it was ours, and ours alone. We understood it, and explored it, and deepened it, and continued creating it, one day, one hour, one minute at a time; lovingly and carefully crafting all our pieces - the broken ones, the healed ones, and the whole ones - into a quilt of pure, true, undying love to give us warmth, and peace, and comfort, and strength when the world became too much.

But we weren't finished with it. We weren't even close; we'd just started! And no one else can jump in and help me finish it, because it's OURS. We are the only two people who can make our quilt, and now you're gone; I can't finish it without you, either, because it's not mine alone to create. It simply has to go unfinished, and I have to continue living without that warmth, and peace, and comfort, and strength. I have to continue living without you. But I don't know how to do that. It's too hard, and too scary.

I'm so LOST, baby. I'm in this terrifying, pitch-black forest with no trail and no signposts - not even any stars I could use to navigate. I don't see any way out. All I see is the obliterated road behind me, where our love lived. But I can't go back there. Ahead is just a tangle of vines reaching out to entrap me, and trees blocking any path, and rocks tripping me, and I don't know how to get through it. I don't even know where I'm supposed to go. And no one can tell me where I'm supposed to go, so I'm paralyzed. All I can do is sit here in the terrifying darkness and cry out for you: the one person who could help me find my way to myself, and the one person who won't.

If you were here, carrying the burden of this pandemic would be manageable. We'd even manage to have fun with it, because it would be very much like our weddingmoon: we'd have the time and the space to focus on each other. I'd be experimenting in the kitchen; you'd be pretending that everything I cook is fantastic, even though we both know that's not true. We'd use the calendar to remember whose fault any given day is, and I'd be thrilled if a meal-gone-wrong happened on your day so I could blame you.

We'd be sitting here this afternoon, on this beautiful day, with all the windows open, watching the cats enjoy the sunshine and the breeze. We'd be holding hands. We'd talk, using the language we created in our love over four years together. We would just be together.

And tomorrow, I'd get back to work. I'd be fully engaged, stretching my brain, doing my job and loving it - talking to my colleagues, writing code, getting frustrated trying to debug the code I'd just written. And you'd be sitting where I am right now, probably watching the news so you can catch me up every time I come out for more coffee or water and to kiss your handsome face.

But you're not here, and you'll never be here, and I don't know what to do. In my vows, I promised to "love you - the verb - even on the inevitable days when I don't love you - the feeling." But the thing is, I never had a day when I didn't love you - the feeling. I had days when you irritated me, because, y'know, we're human. But there wasn't a single minute of a single day when I didn't feel overwhelming love for you. And I still feel it. But I have no way to love you - the verb - now. Not really. Not in a way that I can feel that you feel it, and loving you was just as much about making sure you FELT my love as it was about acting on my love for you. And now, I have no way to know if you feel it or not. And that's just another in a long list of many, many heartbreaks.

I miss you, Doug. I miss you so much. The days and nights are endless without you. My skin aches to feel your arms around me. I've actually figured out that if I position myself JUST RIGHT on the recliner, turned on my side and pushed all the way against the armrest, I can almost imagine that it's you pressing against me and spooning me. Almost. How pathetic and desperate is that? But the fact is that humans are not designed to go weeks, months, years without being touched. And I'm not designed to live without you.

I wish I could see you again. I wish we could talk. I wish you could hold me. I wish for so much, and I can't have any of it.

I'm so lost without you, baby, and I don't know how to get un-lost. .

Always your loving wife,
Kathleen