I woke up this morning to the gentle rumble of my Boston terrier snoring beside me – an unremarkable start to the day. With my eyes still closed I listened for Chester complaining in his kennel downstairs to decide if it was actually time to get up. Silence. I took my usual moment to determine what day was dawning and then checked the time. I don’t know what wrestled me from sleep at five in the morning but I felt no compulsion to be the first person at the party of today so I rolled over and tried, unsuccessfully, to seduce sleep back into the room.
I’m used to waking up to an empty house, I’m used to turning off the lights and heading to bed in it too. I’m not afraid of living alone. It’s the time between waking and sleeping that can be hard to cope with, the hours of a day with no set agenda, no commitment, that can be long. The conscious living.
I have a ton of things I could tackle today and not one ounce of gumption to start. Outside the wind was howling and I heard pine cones bouncing off the roof. My bed was comfy and the cocoon I’d made beneath the blankets warm, I didn’t understand sleep’s hesitation to join me.
This quiet moment was both a blessing and a curse – my mind painted a picture of a not too distant past, of a face so familiar I could trace its features with such detail he became real in the weak light sneaking under the curtains. I was filled with such love and sorrow I could hardly breathe and I cursed the hour. I know I will miss him with this intensity as the too many minutes of this day tick their way around the clock.
I am blessed with a million memories, blessed to have married my one true love and yet those blessings are what pains my heart today. I don’t think this grief will ever be satisfied, it demands to be fed. Certainly time is doing what time does, putting distance between the initial blow and the coping with it today – it is buffering the shock and fermenting the pain – but it isn’t erasing the facts. I will live the rest of my life missing and mourning the love of my life.
My little dog continued to snore as I wrestled with the reality of the day, pine cones pelted the roof and the wind whistled through the trees. The day dawned like the ones before and the ones to come and I faced the choice of how to take it on. This is what time is teaching me right now, that I have a choice – I can acknowledge grief and not succumb or I can spend the day indulging it. I swing between the options – right now I feel strong and the day beckons…. Onward.