The Last Love Note

by Emma Grey

but if I can’t be comfortable in my own house, where can I be?

That’s the problem with grief. It’s not packed tidily in a box that you can bring out in appropriate, private moments and sort through. It’s threaded inconveniently through everything.

You can grieve a breakup, too, and grieve someone’s absence from your life, but when someone dies, it’s soul-deep. An impossible-to-grasp, endless absence not just from you, but from the entire world. You won’t run into them by accident in the supermarket. You can’t stalk them on social media. Your best friend won’t furnish you with gossip about their next steps. There’s just nothing. Forever.

this is someone who has picked up pieces that were never his responsibility to reassemble.

They say it’s just like having a second child, falling in love again. That when you’ve lost a partner, you can eventually love two people at the same time. But the idea of that is so distant from me right now that I can’t accept it as true or understand how it would work.

“And I can’t promise I won’t be. You can’t lie to kids who have been forced to become miniature death experts.”

I feel this immense responsibility to stay alive.

When he smiles, it lights up the whole café. My body absorbs the light, desperate for the flicker of warmth.

Hugh walks beside me and must be well aware of my crying but is doing nothing to cheer me up. It’s the perfect response. So many people can’t handle someone’s discomfort, but this gentle strength is exactly what I need right now. Of course that makes me cry even more.…

“How are you so freaking together all the time?” I find myself sniping at him, very unfairly. “You always know what to say. You’re constantly doing exactly what’s needed. You cope with everything, no matter how hard. Your life is just this shiny, untarnished, extraordinary, seamless, easy experience and I am envious as hell.”

It’s a lot like grief, standing here. You’re dragged from the shallows into the depths where it’s dark and heavy and you can’t see or hear or breathe. There were times over the last two years when, if I screamed, grief would swallow up the noise. It was bigger than my voice. A whirl of emotion for which there’s no sufficient word in the entirety of the English language.

But at some point people have to go back to their own lives. You can’t expect them to sit with you forever or be there for every leaking tap or flat tire. As that first wave of support retreats, you’re forced to turn into the single parent you never signed up to be.

“When you walked in here, I could tell you had suffered a great loss. It’s all over your face. Your posture. It’s in your voice.”

“Take it from a very old woman. No amount of sadness is going to bring your husband back. Did he want you to be happy when he was alive?” “Blissfully.” She smiles. “Don’t take that away from him, then, in death.”

I’d never considered it quite this way. Staying sad and half-living this life since he died. It’s all I’ve been able to manage and what I thought people expected. But it’s not me. Am I betraying his greatest wish for me?

He’s probably sorry this is exposing a wound. What people don’t get is the wound is always exposed. You can’t be reminded of something when it’s all you think about, even after you learn to go about the business of the day simultaneously.

“The point is, it’s your life. Your decision. Your timing. You might resist it now, but you’ll know the moment when it comes, and not before. And then you’ll realize the bigger risk is not taking a risk.”

I’ve seen more sunrises since Cam died than I’d seen in my life up until then. They’re a promise; no matter how bad everything is, the world keeps turning.

How long is it reasonable to drag out your recovery from grief until you’re expected to get your act together again? Or maybe that’s where I’m going wrong. You don’t recover from it. There is no “healed” moment. You just absorb it into your new life, somehow, and go from there.

Grief is strange, when it happens in advance. Since Cam’s diagnosis two years ago, I’ve been processing this loss every day. I thought the time we had to accept it would make it easier. Sudden death must be so blindsiding in comparison. But now I’m here, I’m blindsided anyway, because I never truly believed this would unfold. Never stopped hoping for a miracle, even though we were so obviously not going to get one.

There’s so much focus in grief on getting through all the “firsts.” First birthday without the person. First Christmas. First day of a new year they’ll never share with you. Before that, though, there’s a series of “lasts.” And by the time you’re aware of them, you’ve missed them. Things fade beyond comprehension. It’s too late for the words you’ve been saving.

And yet this city’s lights still dance. Central Park still blooms.

The shows go on. Grief is absorbed into its story. And it’s extraordinary.

This is not a fork in the road, I realize. It’s just the road. There’s no Story A and Story B. There’s one, imperfect, meandering direction.

I’ve learned that love outlives death. It holds steady through despair. It won’t fade, even as time elapses and distance increases and your world shifts.