And so it is done.
He has been cremated. There will be a family service at his sister’s house this afternoon. I will not be there. I just found out about it this morning. His sister, his daughter, and his wife (they were in a long process of divorcing) discussed it, and while his wife was okay with me being there, they didn’t want to have to deal with the questions, and have it distract from the purpose of the service, which was to celebrate a wonderful man. I understand. Now is not the time. I can only assume that they are as devastated as I am, and I don’t wish to cause them any further discomfort on top of pain this all-encompassing. And I think I could not have grieved as I needed to if I had to hide who I was to him, and who he was to me. They were not expecting me. And none of us were expecting this.
They want to meet me, though, his daughter, his sister, his brother, and his closest friends, and so I await the scheduling of that. I still have my ticket to go visit him next weekend, and perhaps that’s when I’ll go. As his sister said in her e-mail this morning, if we don’t meet soon, we may never, and that would be a shame. It’s easy to let time pass and then too much passes and it would just be awkward. More awkward.
I am staying home today, to lie in bed and cry and mourn. I’ve gone to work all week, trying to function by way of distraction, and the belief that shutting down entirely can’t be good for me, however tempting. It’s been hard, and I have broken down many, many times at work. I decided I didn’t need to work so hard to hold it together today. Last night I went through pictures to select some to share with his family and reread some old chats. I found the one, a little over a year old, where we talked about his sister-in-law passing away and my worries about if something happened to him, and he gave me his daughter’s e-mail. That one was especially hard to read, especially when he said “People my age aren’t supposed to be dying.” I couldn’t agree more. And he said he’d live forever, and I told him he’d damn well better. This is so wrong. So very, very wrong.
Yesterday I stopped for a smoothie on the way to work, because my stomach can’t tolerate much solid food and I can’t eat noodles for breakfast like I normally would, because that’s what he ate for breakfast most days. At a table playing cards outside the restaurants at the strip mall was an elderly couple, well into their 70s. I started crying as soon as I got the car door shut. Why do they get all that time, and we did not? Not that I would take that time away from them. I just want mine. I just want my sweetie back, and there’s nothing that can make that happen.
The bitch of it is, there are moments when I can force myself not to think about it actively. But I don’t want to not think about him. I thought about him all the time when he was alive; I can do no less now. And yet thinking about him wrecks me. But there is no lesser evil in choosing between numb and completely distraught.
I am a woman of words, and that will be the thing that brings me comfort. Talking about him, in e-mails to friends, to his brother and sister, and talking about him to E seems to help a little bit. And because our long-distance relationship was largely conducted via e-mail and daily chat, I have a vast archive of the bulk of our conversations. I have literally thousands of e-mails from him. And when I read his words, I hear his voice, and he is not so very far away. It is not the same. It is not nearly enough. But it is all I have.
What wrecks me most is thinking of all the little things I so loved about him that I will never have again. All our in-jokes. Our pet names for each other. Holding him. Hearing his voice, his laugh. It is too much sacrifice, all at once, to have someone you love taken from you. It rips you apart.
heartbreaking