Dreams unwind
Love’s a state of mind.
-Fleetwood Mac
Sometimes I wonder if I was ever married. It all feels like a mirage in my head. Memories of when we were single, living together near the beach in a studio apartment, without many cares in the world. Was that real? Our first house. Our second house. Baby 1, 2, and 3. The trips we took. Grocery shopping. Working together. Watching movies together. It was real, right?
Tomorrow, in just six hours, it will be three months since my husband passed away. I’ve gone through several waves of grief. Numbness, okayness, angerness, I’m happy, I’m a wreck, I’ve got this, I don’t have this, just every emotion you can think of.
Guys, it’s tough.
Having three kids under the age of 6 years old sort of helps, I guess. I’m so damn tired I don’t have many opportunities to feel sorry for myself. But once the kids go to sleep, in the middle of the night when the house is still and I am still awake, I feel it. I feel the empty space surround me, suffocating me. He’s not here. He’s not coming back. Was he ever real?
I think of everything I would do differently if I had known I was only going to have “X” number of years with my husband. Things I would say to him. I wonder if I’ll ever meet another man (although logically I think I would, since I’m only 34 years old right now), and I think that if I do, I’ll be the best damn partner ever because of all these hard lessons I’ve had to learn. I feel like I would spend every day living as if it were the last day on Earth together. My brain sorts things differently: important, unimportant. I don’t want to spend time on the unimportant. Our lives are too precious and short.
We did one thing right. My husband and I savored the shit out of our lives with the kids. We took them everywhere. We enjoyed them. I continue to enjoy them.
I just wish he were here. I wish he could see how our youngest, almost 17 months old, has started to develop this funny little personality with a mind of his own. I wish my husband could hear our daughter speaking in sentences, something she couldn’t do three months ago. She’s opinionated and feisty and I’m loving the person she is expressing to us. I wish my husband could see our oldest, about to start the first grade, who requested that his hair stylist cut his hair like his daddy’s. There’s nobody who can love my kids the way he did.
Now there is just me. I feel it. That space. The loneliness. The feeling in the pit of your stomach. Loss.
And a long, winding road with an unknown destination. Where do I go now? That’s what I’m in the process of figuring out.
The rest of my life.
Teresa Shimogawa 