Day 106

Most times I feel okay but then sometimes I am swamped. The fucking reality of it - there is something about it the mind turns away from. It’s not about accepting it so much as realizing it - really, really realizing it. How does the word accept even get used, how can I accept it when it is not acceptable and therefore can’t be accepted.

It’s interesting in an awful sort of way that even as you think something is unbearable - like this sadness I feel, or like a bone sticking out of your shin as you walk through the desert toward the lights, and safety - you are in fact bearing it.

I tell my husband, Just so you know, I am never going to be okay with it, I am never going to “feel better” or ‘get over’ this. I am angry-crying which is better than the despair lurking just off my interior coastline, always creeping like a fog.

You shouldn’t, he says, agreeing. It’s outrageous.

I cry in his arms until the dog shows up and then I go back to my office and continue to not look in the box which sits there behind the door smelling a little bit of barn, of old house, of ancient mice droppings.

I keep returning to the last picture, the one your mom texted to me. I know why the shine of tears is there, if you look carefully enough (or blow the picture up big enough). Your mom told me exactly what was said before the picture was taken. I look in your eyes and I can see how, even ravaged, admitting the cause was lost cost you. Your smile is abbreviated by pain but still so full of tender regretfulness preparing to leave the world.

Your grief for yourself, for everything you were going to miss, is just so unfucking unbearable.

They fucking burned him up, I shout at my husband, who is patient and understanding. He holds me and reminds me that we are planning cremation for ourselves, knowing I know that. None of this is a surprise, it’s just that all of it is a huge fucking shock.

I try to articulate the horror the fact of your physical gone-ness fills me with. I guess it comes down to, there is no pretending - there’s no fucking year of magical thinking when you’ve been turned to ash.

My husband listens and then says how energy doesn’t disappear just changes form, even if the body is reduced to ashes and bone - the kind of thing you used to say, in fact. Spontaneous lectures on laser diodes and such.

Well *I* don’t feel his energy, it’s not visiting ME, I yell. He’s just GONE I cry. I cry and cry. I am a fucking madwoman of crying. My husband says see I don’t believe that, maybe you are feeling his energy right now and this is his sadness you’re expressing too and though I cry even harder it makes me feel better.