You implode when someone you love dies. All of your thoughts and feelings fall in on themselves until there's nothing left of any substance. People say they know how you feel, but they don't. Not unless they've imploded too.
It has been a month. Thirty-one days. The sun still seems too bright, like it has dropped millions of miles closer to the earth. Noises are piercing. A fork dropped on the floor sounds like an atomic blast. Colors aren't right, and time certainly isn't right. Hours tick by and yet nothing seems to move. Even the dust circling in the ceiling fan breeze seems suspended.
But thirty-one days and nights have passed. And in thirty-one days and nights I have relived the last moments of his life millions of times. Second by second, movement by movement, and can still make no sense of it.
He awoke. He stepped out of bed. He fell. He spoke. He died. They came. They pummeled. They shocked. They intubated. They left. They took him. He was gone.
I hold his ring. Should I be able to feel him? Should there still be a connection? Love transcends all, right? No it doesn't. I laugh and it echoes. The echo is sadistic. It isn't the sound I want to hear.
Life goes on. I must work. But facing people is hard. Surely the label of "grieving" is tattooed somewhere visibly. Not as an excuse or an apology, but as a stigma. I had something precious and it died in my presence. I don't know how to relate to the world because of that.
Six months. I don't remember what he sounded like. That hurts. That's scary. I remember his last words, but not the voice. That's not fair.
I'll never forget what he looked like. I've gathered all the photos I can find of him and I'm hording them. They each show a different side of him. I want to believe only I knew some of those sides.
I still relive all of the last moments. It isn't as often. But it is still daily. And there is still no sense to it. Bethany says there will be no sense to it ever. To stop trying for it to make sense. She should know. She's the grief counselor.
Every week she makes me repeat the same thing. I will do no harm to myself or others. I say it. It isn't hard to say because there's no harm I could do. The harm's been done. The slice of me that's gone will forever be gone. Taking another slice wouldn't change that.
I'm a highly functioning shell. She knows that. I can see it in her eyes while she listens to me. And I know that her job now is to make me accept this as my destiny.
Journal she said. Write it out. I have. It's been a year and all of it has been written. Nothing has been written. I've listed everything that made me love him. I've listed everything that could have been a flaw in him. I've listed the hopes we had. I've listed the problems we had.
But it's still all in there. It's just in two places now, the journal and my soul. Reading the journal would give you my soul. That should bother me. It doesn't. From the moment they flopped him on the gurney and hauled it out into the darkness to disappear below the gyrating lights of the ambulance, there hasn't been much soul anyway. It was sucked away when I heard his last breath and realized there were no more to follow.
My soul was his. He took it with him. And you only get one.
Sixteen months. Twelve marked by tears. Four marked by resignation. Still a shell. Still functioning. But realizing that it can be survived.
I'm beginning to see that I can't rebuild the shell. I can't fill it. But I can support it, even cushion it. I've gone through that list of hopes. Those that were his that I had taken ownership of, I've released. Those that were mine, I'm retooling. Those that were ours...well. I'm still just reading those again, and again, and again.
I moved. The house was too much us. I needed a my place where I could pull out us and caress it when I had the strength. It was too much having it bombard me from every corner. Now I can regulate the pain. I can decide when I have the strength to become us for a short while. The rest of the time I'm me.
But it is a little better now. Being just me is okay. Not great, but okay. I don't shine in anything, but I don't fade into nothing as often either. The walls no longer close in, or sway. They are spotted with new me things and old us things. I choose what to look at as I walk by.
The world can come a little closer. Just a little. I don't flinch from hands reaching for the same bin of onions at the grocery. Such a silly thing. Always afraid I'll see his hands again. I loved his hands. They were on the list of loved things that Bethany made me write. I'm sure she never suspects that I read it daily.
Implosions don't stop. They don't end. They fade and then grow again. Or do you just implode a second time, a third, on and on?
Another city. Another place to wish and dream and hope and pray. Another set of experiences that I know would have been better shared. Twenty-seven months and the implosion isn't over. It hovers.
I cry. I cry for him, for me, for those who never met him. For the things I do without him. For the life I pretend to live. For what he could have done. For what we could have been.
Tell me that it ends. Tell me that the dust finally settles, and someone comes and hauls away the bits and pieces of your soul so that you don't have to see the shattered remains. Tell me that someday I'll be telling him of sunlight in my dreams, and not of shadow. Tell me that someday he will see me smile and not cry. Perhaps that is the gift I still owe him.