M & M

The man and the monster. This is all I have been thinking about today. The man I loved and the monster that left us. I am torn up inside with this dichotomy of emotions. The love and anger – the sadness and the rage. This tornado of emotions has been swirling around inside my soul all day. All I wanted to do today was to hear your voice. Then all I wanted was to call someone and ask “is this real?”

I don’t understand how the man I married and loved, had two children with, could have done this. I just don’t get it. I just don’t believe he is gone. It is impossible. I feel like he is going to walk in that door any moment home from work. The fact that he isn’t – I don’t know. It just feels so very wrong.

I find myself doing something – making lunch or some other mundane thing and I just space out. I lose minutes at a time lost in my own head – wondering how this is possible. Thinking about our last days – his last minutes. I am loosing my mind.

The man I loved would never have left us. He never would have walked away from his three children. He would not have wanted to miss tonight’s dinner conversation; how our four and six year old described in detail how your body works when you throw up. He never would have left this. How could he have been so adamant that we were meant to be together? How could he have known from day one that he was going to marry me and then kill himself? How does that happen?

Then there are the moments when I feel like he was a stranger – a strange and awful monster to have left me alone to struggle through this ordeal. This man who left without a care in the world – with a stupid note that gave me no answers, just saying that I would be fine. Left me trying to clean up impossible messes and ruined my life. Left his three children fatherless. He must have been a monster, to live only in the moment and not look ahead to better times. To think whatever problems he had weren’t fixable or worth trying to solve. To think we would be better off without him. Only a monster could do this, not the man I loved.

I went hysterical in Costco today. If you were there and saw some girl crying in the toilet paper aisle – that was me. Because the sight of 300 rolls of toilet paper only makes me think of my dead husband. Because so much of my daily shopping was for him; paper goods and snacks, I will never be able to look at them the same.

The children don’t mention you as much these days. I will casually ask around bedtime if anyone wants to talk about daddy, or what we remember about daddy or what we miss. Sometimes they respond, some nights they both shake their heads no. I never push. I worry though, on the nights they don’t want to talk about you. That maybe their short memories are fading right before my very eyes. Sometimes I worry that I won’t be able to picture your face in my mind like I can now. But on the nights we don’t talk about you, as much as I worry, I am relieved. It is so hard to keep the poker face on at night. I feel like I wear it all day long that by evening, I am just worn out. I don’t want to wear any face – I just want to be.

Meanwhile my children keep asking for more and more nightlights. Their room could light up Broadway. They say they are scared of monsters – that makes three of us!