Bookend

On October 17, 2019, I married the love of my life, during the dream trip of a lifetime. 126 days later, he died. 126 days after that, is today. 

We promised each other 20 years. We got 126 days. 

We will never celebrate a single anniversary. I'll never be able to tell him he's even more handsome than he was the day I married him. We didn't even have time to go through all our pictures and make a wedding album.

I've been Doug's widow exactly as long as I was his wife. And I cannot explain why that feels like a knife to my heart, but it does. It's like some kind of permanent stamp, marking our marriage null and void. Yeah, I know it's over; but this somehow feels different - almost as though it no longer counts.

I've been keeping my grief off the radar, for reasons you already know if you've been following along. And after this, I'll be going dark again. But this is a milestone I couldn't ignore. Don't interpret my quiet, or my sense of humor - the only quality I've kept since Doug died - to mean that I'm okay. I am decidedly not okay, and I become less so each day.

That said, I've learned that trying to explain how I feel is an exercise in futility. So instead, I'll give you a video I happened upon on Reddit, which provides a visual demonstration of the little, ordinary moments that make up a relationship, and what happens when one is left behind. Watch this. Then take how sad it makes you feel, multiply that sadness by about a hundredfold, and imagine feeling like that all the time for 126 days, with every reason to think that that will be the case in another 126 days, and 126 days after that, and 126 days after that...

I am NOT okay. I don't think I ever will be okay again.