It’s just too much for me today.  I feel incapacitated.  I think Easter and my birthday were heavier than I even thought as I went through them.

The counselor asks me what you brought to my life and our friendship and says I should still bring this, hear you in my mind doing or saying those things you did or said.   But telling myself I look beautiful or giving myself a hug when I’m sad because you died- that doesn’t work at all.  I cry many times today- once stepping out of the kitchen to the little side hallway and leaning against the wall while Audrey played and sang in the “playroom” (our living room).  In that moment, I longed for you.  I remembered something I’d forgotten- just how comforting it was to get a hug from  your spouse in your time of need or sadness.  I remember just for a second how luxurious it was to have a partner in all of this.

How luxurious.
And when you were here, I never knew anguish like this.

I have had what I used to call “epic” dreams when I’d describe them to you- dreams that seemed to have prequels and sequels that went on for many, many years, in one night.  Sometimes when I woke up, I questioned the length of time I’d been having that dream or if that dream had really occurred in some other realm.  Those dreams lend me the possibility that this really is all an epic dream- that what feels like years will seem like one night’s dream when I wake up and get out of this horrible nightmare.  Maybe such is life…an epic dream.

Today is nice weather so I feel the pressure to take Audrey outside.  I pack egg salad sandwiches and go to the park and playground with her pail and shovel and a book for me to read.  We sit on a bench in the breeze eating our sandwiches and I stare at the Hudson river.  I remember when I was a child and learned that the earth was round.  Suddenly I felt I could feel the roundness and that the sky above me looked like a sphere.  It is like that now, I think.  My world and my creatureness has a new shape I can’t “unsee” and it is always present to me…I feel it beneath my feet on the earth- and above me in the spherical skies.