Are you sure this is my life?
It happened again last night, a moment where I felt like I was standing outside of myself thinking, “This cannot be my life.” I’ve had many, many moments like that since A passed away, exactly 5 months ago. They always come when I am doing the most mundane things. Last night I was taking my earrings out before bed and it hit me. I’ve felt it while showering. I’ve felt it while chewing a sandwich.
It is a most peculiar feeling, where part of my mind is asking “How is it that you are just doing these normal, every day, unremarkable things, after what’s happened?” I do not know how, and I do not know what else I imagine I’d be doing. And riding tandem with that thought is the idea that this cannot possibly be my life. How can I be a widow? How can someone who was so important to me, such a part of my daily life, not be here? How could he have died at all, let alone with no warning? People I love don’t die, I think, as if I were somehow more special than the rest of the human race and should or could avoid tragedy. I feel like the woman taking out her earrings is someone else, a part I’m playing, like I’ve separated from myself momentarily.
Am I disintegrating, in the truest sense of the word?
I get up, I go to work, I talk to people, I laugh, and to most outward appearances I imagine I seem “back to normal.” Perhaps I don’t at all, and I’m just fooling myself instead of everyone else. But the sadness is my constant companion, a heaviness of heart that merely changes its position on the stage of my mind, rather than exiting entirely. I accept that, and that others do not see most of that sadness is a choice I’ve made. I talk to myself about my grief, in these writings, in others, in my own head. I avoid for their sake what I cannot avoid at all.
When I really think about it, there is little in my life, for better or worse, that I ever expected to happen. Not my job, not where I live, not who I am or what I know how to do or who my friends are, not the status of my health, so the idea of having lost my beloved to death is just one more unexpected reality that I never could’ve foreseen. Such is life. But this one…it is so much harder to swallow.
I know it doesn’t make any sense, but the question I’m almost afraid to utter is “Why wasn’t my love, our love enough to keep you here?” And with that, I find I’m not really over looking at other people and wondering why they are still here and you are not. The anger has gone out of the question, but the question remains to vex and perplex me. I walk past a 70-year-old man smoking cigarettes, as he has no doubt been doing for decades, and I wonder why he can abuse his body like that and have all these years you didn’t. It seems like you were just doomed by your genes. Why you? Why not someone I didn’t know and didn’t care about? Why one of my best friends in the world instead of someone further out on the edge of my circle? Why would someone as perfect for me as you come into my life, only to be pulled violently (at least from my perspective) out of it? What was the point?
I guess it seems cruel. If you’re going to take something good away from someone, why give it to them in the first place? I cannot understand it. I know I will not understand it. I don’t know why I keep asking the questions when I know there are no answers. Why do I torment myself? And yet, these are the questions. How can I not ask them as they well up? I cannot accept the “perfection” of this plan, as all the gurus and preachers tell me I should. I can accept that this is how things are, even as bizarre as I find this truth, but to accept it as “perfect” is just too much to ask. Maybe it truly is perfect, but to expect me to have a superhuman understanding of the universe to see that is to expect a dog to meow. I’m a human being. If on some other plane I am something else, if some day when I die it will all become clear, then that’s great, but it doesn’t do me any good right now.