Donathen my love,
I am smoking your cigarettes, despite not liking menthol. I am wearing your bracelet. I am using your creams and lotions and foot scrubs. I am putting on medicated lip balm that you kept in your jacket pocket. I feel closer to you doing these things. I know you have touched them, I know your lips and your skin and your hands and your lungs, and your elbows, and your feet have been touched by these objects. I am meeting women, women like me who are not old. Who look at the long road ahead without their love, like me. Slowly we are finding one another. We are people who have to consider that life will go on and on and on. The older widows, they have different problems. They have life is at an end problems. I am told this is why I cannot be in a group with them, and so I am waiting for a group that will let me in. A group of people who look at the rest of their lives as though it stretches forever, but all of us- no matter our age, or our gender-have that one thing in common. Loss. The emptiness that is living without the other. Forever until we die is how it seems. I know that old or young, rich or poor, we are a brotherhood. A sisterhood of longing and aching and weeping and wringing of hands. We are the same in that we mourn specifically. We mourn the absence of a lover, a boyfriend, or girlfriend, a wife, or husband, a help mate, or soul mate. It is different than losing a Father. Or Mother. It is different than losing a childhood friend, or co-worker. So very different. Every day a challenge without the one who shared in everything, like a twin joined at the hip who is suddenly amputated. No matter the miles, or time spent away from one another, always a connection. Never not a connection. Then death comes like a surgeon. And your other half has been ripped from you. Every day a long 24 hour period where hope and meaning are challenged with every minute that ticks by.
I use your things my love, so that I am closer to you. I put my fingers where your fingers were. I scoop out the lip balm, knowing that you touched it and now I am touching you. I put the goop on my lips, remembering as I do it -how you did it. And I smile. Yes, sweetheart it makes me smile. All of your little idiosyncrisies make me smile as I remember them. And for a moment, we are together. And then it is gone. But still, that moment is a sweet one. And I look forward to these moments. Even if they fall a million miles away from the reality that once was you.
I am smoking your cigarettes, despite not liking menthol. I am wearing your bracelet. I am using your creams and lotions and foot scrubs. I am putting on medicated lip balm that you kept in your jacket pocket. I feel closer to you doing these things. I know you have touched them, I know your lips and your skin and your hands and your lungs, and your elbows, and your feet have been touched by these objects. I am meeting women, women like me who are not old. Who look at the long road ahead without their love, like me. Slowly we are finding one another. We are people who have to consider that life will go on and on and on. The older widows, they have different problems. They have life is at an end problems. I am told this is why I cannot be in a group with them, and so I am waiting for a group that will let me in. A group of people who look at the rest of their lives as though it stretches forever, but all of us- no matter our age, or our gender-have that one thing in common. Loss. The emptiness that is living without the other. Forever until we die is how it seems. I know that old or young, rich or poor, we are a brotherhood. A sisterhood of longing and aching and weeping and wringing of hands. We are the same in that we mourn specifically. We mourn the absence of a lover, a boyfriend, or girlfriend, a wife, or husband, a help mate, or soul mate. It is different than losing a Father. Or Mother. It is different than losing a childhood friend, or co-worker. So very different. Every day a challenge without the one who shared in everything, like a twin joined at the hip who is suddenly amputated. No matter the miles, or time spent away from one another, always a connection. Never not a connection. Then death comes like a surgeon. And your other half has been ripped from you. Every day a long 24 hour period where hope and meaning are challenged with every minute that ticks by.
I use your things my love, so that I am closer to you. I put my fingers where your fingers were. I scoop out the lip balm, knowing that you touched it and now I am touching you. I put the goop on my lips, remembering as I do it -how you did it. And I smile. Yes, sweetheart it makes me smile. All of your little idiosyncrisies make me smile as I remember them. And for a moment, we are together. And then it is gone. But still, that moment is a sweet one. And I look forward to these moments. Even if they fall a million miles away from the reality that once was you.
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