Someday, Maybe

by Onyi Nwabineli

But the worst thing about death, the thing that makes the comparison laughable, almost cruel, is there is no chance of reconciliation. With death there are no do-overs. No drunk-dialing snowballing into hour-long reminiscences that end in reunion—the kind of sheet-tangling makeup sex that makes you stop in your tracks when you are besieged by a flashback. This isn’t something that can be forgiven with a kiss. With death your suffering is permanent.

To grieve is to frighten the people you love. My behavior seems to have scared my husband’s name right out of my family’s vocabulary. They treat me like a patient afflicted with a nameless disease. But patient or not, they do not leave me in peace.

My mother loves Jesus. Therefore, she does not get stressed; she gets holy.

Nobody tells you that irrational hope is a side effect of grief. And they should because it is dangerous.

Quentin is gone and this, his persistent absence, should be the worst thing about losing a spouse. But—treat of treats—I have the added bonus of a searing, unabating, viselike guilt, a result of failing to notice he was in danger of being lost.

But grief torches your capacity for both sympathy and empathy. I am nothing but a selfish collection of exposed nerve endings.

Husbands are not supposed to die in real life. Not when they are thirty-three years old and healthy; not when they leave behind a wife who is struggling to cope.

Your options as a Nigerian child are success or greater success. Mediocrity is to be cut out like a cancer, your pliable loin fruit molded into world-class surgeons and lawyers through discipline, a diet high in roughage and the best education a combination of government funding and extortionate school fees can buy.

It was like he dipped his hand past the buttons of my shirt and snatched out my heart. He never did give it back either.

It needs to be said that Aspen is not a nice person. Because she thinks she has dibs on suffering, she will expose every morsel of tender flesh before sinking her fangs in. Her default tone of voice is “hiss.” She is not pleased I have been avoiding her because Aspen is not to be avoided; she is to be revered and her needs are to be met above all.

What is love if it misses that which drags your husband beneath the surface, never to be rescued?

The consensus is that when someone beloved by all dies, those closest to that person are supposed to band together and parse out the grief so it doesn’t succeed in destroying anyone.

Two weeks, six months, ten years from now, Q will still be dead, and I will still be a widow being dashed against the rocks of husbandless pain. It doesn’t get better; it just doesn’t get any worse.

Grief is not neat. Pain is not dignified. Both are ugly, visceral things. They rip holes through you and burst forth when they see fit. They are constant, controlling companions, and if they don’t destroy you or your relationships with others, they certainly go a long way to damaging you, disfiguring you internally and altering your existence so much so that when you are lucid enough to look at yourself, at your life, you are astounded (and often disgusted) by what you find staring back at you.

There is nothing eloquent about my grief. It scares people. I slouch into a room and nobody knows how to react. I will take silent uneasiness over unsolicited advice any day, one more everything happens for a reason might push me over the line into homicidal.

They say you’re meant to say fucked-up things when you’re grieving—all the pain you’re feeling comes out as shots you throw at others, knowing they will forgive you because they have no choice. But you are not prepared when it happens.

I was introduced to a unique and novel helplessness watching the keeper of my heart be demoralized in this way.

I am woken by the ache in my ribs. There is no reminder of pain as poignant as the physical manifestation of it over the place your heart resides.

There lives within all humans an inherent arrogance. An oftentimes misplaced confidence and assuredness that we are in control of every occurrence in our lives.

And while it is bad to miss that the love of your life is drowning, it is infinitely worse for the love of your life to be drowning and not trusting you enough to share that with you.

Because it is one thing for part of me to hate my dead husband, but it is entirely another for my family and my best friend to hate him, too. Like a patriot chastising a foreigner for criticizing his country, it should be me and me alone able to condemn Quentin’s shortcomings. He left me, not them. I am justified.

When your effort is concentrated on not talking about a thing, the effort itself becomes another thing.

Nobody tells you that to grieve is to shoulder the expectations of others. The requirement is that you mourn in silence, cloak yourself in dignity and make others comfortable. I do not know how. Therefore I grieve out loud.

Every day is like waking up and realizing your arm has wandered off during the night. You start a million conversations before reality slaps you.

It’s funny. You spend your time learning that you should not tie your happiness up in another person, that the love of another should only underpin your life instead of dominate it, that men are not the prize. You learn these things, but in the end you devote yourself to a man, because you are nineteen and he brings you books and is almost physically perfect to the point it hurts to look at him sometimes. Like staring into the sun.

Grief makes you believe you are special, its one and only; like it is not careening around destroying millions of lives every day and is devoting all its unwanted attention on you.

I think all of us, in our own ways, understand what it is to have a person whose touch is your solace.

I keep thinking as I lose another bit of my mind that all that has gone before and everything that will come after this moment will pale in comparison to this excruciating truth: closure is not promised. It is a gift, and my husband chose to keep it from me.