You think you’ll give her a call on your lunch break today then you remember that she is dead.
.
You’re making the bed.
Or picking clothes up from the floor of the children’s bedroom.
Or stacking the dishwasher.
Or getting into the shower.
.
And it creeps up on you
before you know it
tapping you on the shoulder.
.
Saying
Look.
She’s gone.
And she’s not coming back.
Had you forgotten?
.
Then it’s as if someone pulls a plug out of the bottom of your foot and everything just drains out.
You’re left empty.
.
It’s like losing your keys.
But it’s not the losing of the keys itself.
It’s the sudden
remembering
that you’d forgotten
you’d lost your keys
until just now
when you remembered
that you’d forgotten
that they’re lost
and gone.
.
It’s not so much the absence
you’ve survived that before.
.
Days apart
weeks
a whole month.
.
Achingly painful, yes.
But achievable.
.
So it’s not that she’s away.
.
It’s the foreverness.
.
You look at pictures of her.
Read the words she wrote you in cards.
And it’s just impossible.
The vastness of time.
The irreversibility.
.
You literally
hate it.
.
In fact
you can no longer bear to look at her.
The videos are torture.
Especially the ones from before.
When she looked so well.
So healthy.
So her.
.
Did you really believe in
happily ever after?
Were you that naïve?
.
You child.
.
Why should you get something that is denied so many others?
What makes you so special?
.
It is normal for you to stack the dishwasher and for people to die.
.
You are a cluster of cells clinging by a thread to consciousness.
Your self simply a sense.
Infinitesimally insignificant.
.
You are nothing.
Lower your expectations.
Previous > On Coping #54: Chaos and order
On Coping is my story of surviving on the sidelines of cancer.
It begins in March 2022 with On Coping #1, written the day after my 41st birthday. The day my wife Imogen, the mother of my three children, was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer.
On Coping is the story of what happened next.
I am so sorry for the pain you are going through, George.