Does it get easier?
Hi, my love--
Happy anniversary. This should be number six, instead of the third one (how hard to believe!) that I have spent missing you. I've been buoyed up, lately, by wonderful friends, and by your incredible little girl. It never gets easier, watching her miss you--especially at those moments where I know she isn't aware what it is she's missing: your encouragement, your comfort, your adoration, your playfulness. I, on the other hand, know exactly what she needs--what we both need.
In honor of you, I spent 3 hours this weekend on the phone with people who knew you, loved you, and loved us. It was good to miss you with somebody. I am less proud of the fact that I monopolized a conversation at a friend's open house with my nostalgia, and reduced a very nice new friend (at least I hope she will be a friend) to tears about her own recent loss of her mother. It was, perhaps, not my finest hour.
I wish you were here to talk about the silly, odd traditions of anniversary gifts, to have a quiet lunch, to go for a walk. I wish you were at work, and I could be secure in the notion that when I came home--or you did--we'd be together, a family, the way it's supposed to be.
I love you.
Your wife Labels: anniversaries, widowhood
Inked!
I got my tattoo today. A good friend and I had a "memorial" tattoo session. The whole process was impressively quick, efficient, and well-done, unlike my first tattoo, which seemed to take forever. Mine is a small stylized flower design (almost more design than flower) that my husband developed for our wedding invitations. The invitations were the single most expensive aspect of our wedding--letter pressed on beautiful paper--and the thing he was most excited about. The design is very clean and modern, and so now I have a dime-sized tribute to him an inch or so below my collarbone and slightly to my left (my wedding-ring hand).
It wasn't painful in the cathartic way I had been hoping for--not that I am usually a pain buff, but in a way, I think, I wanted the physical pain to remind me of the pain of his loss, which becomes not smaller so much as duller every day. In a way, having gotten the tattoo now feels like just one more way in which he is being left behind. So many changes he has missed out on; so much of my life now lived without him. I got the tattoo to mark his presence, but instead it seems only to make more palpable his absence--and to register the futility of my every attempt to hold on.
Labels: tattoos, widowhood
(High) Fidelity
Happy Birthday, my love. Tomorrow you should be turning 38. Your daughter and I should be baking you a cake. Or maybe we'd sneak off to a movie. Or maybe you'd be at work, and our daughter would go to school, and it would be a totally ordinary day, except that you would be here, and that would make it extraordinary.
In some perverse tribute to you, I watched "High Fidelity"--or the parts I could see through my tears--tonight. I remember so clearly the night we saw it (early in your Jack Black phase; the man is certainly talented, even if he is insane, and what a musician). And there are things about its anti-romantic messages about romance, especially the part where the girl says, "I'm too tired not to be with you," or when John Cusack's character says "I never seem to get tired of you," that ring so very true, even if--or perhaps especially if--they are the kinds of things no one ever really says aloud. They reminded us of us when we first saw the movie, and they still do.
I heard an Iraqi war vet talking about life after losing his leg, and it struck me that without you, I am something like an amputee: I used to be whole, and to take that wholeness for granted, but losing you has left me permanently off balance, diminished. I can do all of the things I used to do, and people might never suspect, simply by looking, that there is anything "wrong" with me. Sometimes, I even forget my own incompleteness. But then I feel the absence again, and the space you've left behind aches just as badly as it ever did--or worse, in its renewal. I can learn to make do with what is left of me, and to almost forget what I was like before. But I am irrevocably changed. I don't laugh as much, without you. I don't write much, except when I have to. I feel dreary and dull most of the time, and I seldom get excited about things. I don't look forward to things like I used to. I guess that's what they mean by "the walking wounded"--I am, and I am.
I don't know what I will do tomorrow to mark the date. But it will be for you, and about you, and--dammit--not with you. I love you. Labels: anniversaries, widowhood
Dark Days
What can I say that I haven't said already? I miss him. It's not fair. It sucks. It gets less actively awful, but not really any better. I miss him, and I miss the life we were supposed to have together. I'm tired of being alone in the universe. I'm tired of having to find reasons NOT to wallow in despair.
I miss you, babe. I hope you know that. I hope you know that whatever else I someday find, it will never, ever, take your place--or fill the part of me that was completed by you. In so many ways, you were the part of me I liked best. I miss the laughter, and the hopes, and the memories we didn't get to make. I miss celebrating our daughter with you, and laughing at the same exact thing you find funny. I want to tell you about the funny line I just read on Salon about Jack Black, and hear you say, "He rocks. So HARD," and laugh, not because it's funny, but because the joke is ours and we are together to share it. I want you to see your daughter dance in her first (and probably not last) "Nutcracker." And to pick out a Christmas tree together, and laugh bitterly about how your nutty family has canceled Thanksgiving again, and not really mind because the three of us are all the family we really need.
I may not hurt as badly, but I miss you not one iota less than I did 729 days ago. I still feel bereft, blunted, and impaired.Now I am going home to get powerfully drunk and maybe watch the documentary about the Dixie Chicks before I humiliate myself by crying on campus...AGAIN. I keep thinking I will just quit this stupid blog, since I never have anything new to say, or the energy to find new ways to say it.
Labels: widowhood
