I’m nearing six months- and a new low.

I notice if I tell someone what is now “my story”- that my husband is tragically dead- I always say the same thing, that you died “a few months ago.”  It’s almost six months, but I’m afraid even when it’s a year or more, I’ll be saying “a few months.”  I think partly because I don’t want time to take our living bodies apart- and also because it feels so fresh still.

I sat in our living room today wondering why the hell I had a Christmas tree there in July for a second.  The fact that it’s December, OK January now, feels totally artificial to me.  Time and everything that points to it- seasons and holidays- feels made up and I guess it kind of is.  Hey, maybe I’m on to something.

So yeah, we’re home now.

On the last night of our trip in Arizona things started to feel more heavy.  I think I felt like you do when you’re a little kid biting your lip and trying not to cry- you get that lump in your throat.  It felt like that but on a much larger scale.   And I think because I hadn’t been able to openly grieve for days, I started to become even more sensitive.  My aunt was talking about her niece finding her wedding dress that day, and then of all things, planning a destination wedding in f—ing Switzerland.  While we ate Chinese food my Uncle had the TV on and it was one of those programs they show at the end of the year documenting all of the well-known people who died in 2010.

You.

So many things started to go through my mind.

I thought about how I still remember exactly how we lay in our current bed- so it had to have been in the last year and a half, when we discussed if we’d want to be cremated or buried.  I don’t know why this came up.  You said cremated, and I replied, “Well, what if Audrey and I want a place to come visit?”

You are buried.  Mostly at the request of your parents.

But I think of that, and how we were able to discuss that morbid subject because it simply seemed impossible it would ever come to pass.

But it has.  It really has.

I thought about how my whole life before you seems like a prelude to our meeting.  The last eleven years, my entire adult life,  you molded me and I molded you.  We melded together.

I thought about memory and how I’m not sure which memories to write down and keep anymore.  I still jot down what feels like little “jewels”- funny things that we did or said or happened to us.  But more and more I’m unclear about what those are.  The things I assume are just obvious now and won’t be forgotten, may be.  So should I start writing down all of the ordinary details of our life as I remember it?  Even the words can’t keep all of that.

I thought about how much I hate the words “grief recovery.”  But yet at the same time, it does feel like it’d be nice to form some kind of scab over this gaping wound.  Sometimes I think it is forming, but then the living tears it right open again.

As we drove to the airport yesterday, Audrey commented seriously, “I forgot to show Appa the cactus.”