Word Count: 325
They say it gets easier; it doesn’t. After all the clutter of paperwork, licenses, filings, cancellations, name changes on forms, all his clothing is cleaned and bagged for the Salvation Army, after the busyness of doing all the things that need to be done is over, no moving of furniture, new easy chair, nothing will fill the gaping hole left behind like the yawn of a lion. It’s there, the transparent space you’ve been avoiding, the space where he would have been.
It happened so fast; a pain, an appointment, tests and more tests, a diagnosis, and within just two months, death and a hole. And that’s the time when the missing starts.
I thought I was doing so well. Got through the service, the emptying of closets and drawers, filled them with my own things simply by spacing things out. Separate drawers for bras and panties instead of crammed into one. Sweaters freed of their bags under the bed where they spent summers, gained their permanent year-round home in the bottom drawer where all but one of his have been taken out. That one, the one I last bought him, the one that he loved, the one that I sometimes wear as if its arms are around mine, his chest against mine. As if he were here.
There’s the first year of firsts: Thanksgiving without him, Christmas alone, sipping a glass of white wine as the New Year enters, just adding to the loneliness instead of leaving it calendarily behind. I don’t go to restaurants where we’d go together. I hate driving the road that runs by the hospital.
And the worst, the cold black space on the other side of the bed. I’ve inched over, believing it would feel welcoming, imagining the weight of him, the warmth, and it only feels worse than empty. It’s a space all my love, all my longing, all my missing him and good memories cannot fill.
