Three years without you…

Posted on 26 July, 2019

I loathe late July.

These sunny winter days, wind slicing through the folds of my scarf as I bury my face in it against the cold. I did that in the bushland cemetery, in the sleet, with the flu, choosing a plot for your grave three years ago.

When I think back on the woman I was in the earliest infancy of grief, reeling after you’d been wrenched from us, I just feel immensely sorry. Sorry for me, that you were ripped from my arms and my life and our future.

Sorry for our son and his sister and brother, that they lost their lighthouse and guiding force.

Most of all, I’m sorry for you, that death crept in and stole you out from underneath a life you loved. You were on top of your game, surrounded by love in every direction you looked. It was the worst timing, and the best, because you had it all.

I thought this would get easier by the third anniversary, but it’s harder. It shouldn’t be, because, heading into our fourth year without you, I’m more settled and happier than I’ve been at any point on this side of your death.

The kids are taking enormous steps forward in ways that would send you dizzy with pride. We’re in our new place, our safe, soft place to land—and there are reminders of you in every room.

Your photos, your great big armchair, your favourite painting and rug, all the books you wrote on a shelf beside mine. Oh, and I’ve written a new novel inspired by you. Inspired by us. And it’s as real and romantic and hopeful as we were together…

Maybe that’s part of the problem. This is the year I got my hope back. And mingling hope with grief can do dangerous things to a heart that froze the day you died. It’s precarious—holding space for a potentiality that you yourself wished for me, and I wished for you, had this been the other way around.

Of all the expectations we had for how we’d carry on in each other’s absence, the thought of opening the door to someone else always felt implausible. Wildly out of reach. Theoretically impossible. It still does, a lot of the time.

I remember seeing the obstetrician once, late in pregnancy but well before term. She said I wasn’t ready yet, but I’d gone beyond the point where they’d try to stop labour if it started spontaneously. That’s how I feel now about romance. Never quite ready. Not trying to induce it on purpose. But beyond a point where I’d automatically resist… and the mere thought of that is equal parts confronting, terrifying and delicious — the tangle of mixed emotions that comes with that front row seat at a funeral.

All our ‘happy’ seems shadowed by your absence. Every good thing is bittersweet. There’s not a single event in our lives that isn’t at least a little tarnished, and doesn’t involve our acute awareness that you’re not part of it. Every achievement. Every step. Every choice. You’re threaded through all of it.

The rest of us are not where we were three years ago. But you are. That’s why this is hard. We’ve grown and changed in ways you’ve missed.

If you walked in now—and don’t I wish desperately that you would—there’d inevitably be some awkwardness. A need to bring you up to speed. A re-introduction to the different people we’ve become and the new lives we’ve built since that miserable July day in 2016.

We’ve moved forward while you’ve stayed the same. On this anniversary, our gulf is wider. The distance between us is greater. The time we’ve been apart is longer. My love for you is deeper and less charred by those first flames of white-hot grief that took my breath away.

My love of life is stronger. Everything is just as it should be if I can’t be with you any more. And I know instinctively what you’d say about these different dreams and new places and people.

You’d say, ‘Listen up, this is crucial. Life is short’. You’d ask what I’m waiting for and why. Then you’d tell me, in no uncertain terms, in your forthright, loving, commanding, intelligent way, that everything is what it is, and just to go for all of it…