I write this as I listen to cars traveling in the snowy, slushy rain making that lovely swooshing sound that used to send a sense of calm through me. It is a calm that I can't quite capture through my grief but I am reminded that it used to be there. It is unseasonably cold but I have the windows open anyway. I need the fresh air. Is it a coincidence that you leave me in the same year we don't get to have a spring? I don't know but it feels like the weather is mourning you too.
I search for you everywhere I go. I know this is common but it still feels so lonely not finding you anywhere. I look for you in your chair, on your side of the bed, when I'm out running errands. Every time I walk the sidewalks we traveled together I imagine you there next to me, smiling that beautiful smile of yours but then it isn't real and I keep walking alone, without you.
Our animals look for you still, not as much as they did at first but I think they still haven't quite figured it out yet. I've tried to explain it to them but I know they don't understand and probably never will. I don't know how their minds work but I just hope that they don't think you left them on purpose. I don't know why but that is important to me. Your love for them was so beautiful and I want them to know that it still exists somewhere. It has to because it has to still exist for me too.
I was always the skeptic in our relationship and you opened my mind a little bit but I don't know where to put my beliefs right now. Christianity was never our thing but some sort of spirituality was always a part of us and without you I don't know where my spiritual beliefs land. All I know is what I have learned from the moment I met you, I believe in love. I believe it has its own energy and energy never dies. I don't know if we keep our consciousness when we go but something tells me that that love energy is so strong it remains with us after we leave our bodies. I have to believe that.
You were my everything, S. In fact, you still are my everything. My grief for you consumes me but I don't know where that will lead me. I don't know how long I can hold onto that and still exist in this earthly realm where our energies are tied to these human bodies and we have linear time and responsibilities...and loneliness and emptiness.
I would love to figure out time travel and relive the last ten and a half years with you, maybe even be able to save you this time but that would get me nowhere as we don't have the power to stop death. We don't have the power to stop time. We don't have any power at all over how this deep love takes us over and then is replaced with deep gut wrenching pain when it is broken into pieces.
I will keep looking for you, I don't know how not to. You are still everywhere around me...but now you're nowhere too. I love you so much, S. To the moon and back. Always.
We have yet another thing in common. When my husband died I thought the weather was helping me mourn, too. He died in January and that year we didn't get any snow for weeks. He had a snow removal business and in my mind that lack of snow was symbolic...like he took it with him to make it easier on me. When someone we love dies we try so hard to make sense of it that we look for symbolism to help us heal. And finding those symbols does help so run with them when you can. I believe, as you do, that the energy of love never leaves us and that is comforting.
ReplyDeleteThank you, Jean. I find comfort in your words. You are an inspiration to me and I'm sure many others. My S comically believed in a kind of weather god. He named him Norm. He always said that Norm was with us. I hope that is true. If so, Norm was good to us. He showed us he knew our grief. :)
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