It seems I’m at an impasse.

Everything is quiet.  No calls, emails, letters.  No extra perception of the invisible- of God or of Dan.

So I’m left with this.

I echo a question in a book I’m reading written in the 50’s by another young widow- “Do widows and widowers simply have to learn to live with this aching emptiness at the core of their beings?  Some days it’s worse than others.  But it’s always there.  Do we just have to come to terms with it?  It seems to me that the immense satisfactions of daily living are gone forever.”

And I talk to other young widows who are further along in the hopes that they will tell me this is not true.  But then they don’t.  One this afternoon said it will be very, very hard, and take a very, very long time.  I asked her if she’d had any dreams of her husband, to which she replied- just a couple but they were very disturbing.  Not the kind I was looking for.

Sometimes now I pick up your dirty laundry from the hamper in a heap and hold it close.  These clothes held your body…when you walked on the earth so casually.  When you walked in our bedroom door late at night and let down your shoulders with a sigh to tell me you were exhausted…when you kissed Audrey in the morning and told her, “Daddy tired…daddy tired.”  When you sat at your desk reading about the World Cup and preparing your notes for your ESPN blog before we went to sleep.

It is something about this casualness with which we went about our daily, mundane tasks- that makes it so hard to believe this could happen…something so dramatic.  Had it happened to someone we knew, you would’ve been torn up over it.  This is what I keep thinking.  You would’ve been full of sorrow and questions.

I wish I could talk to you about this.

It seems I’m at an impasse.