Strangers

Everyone is starting to look like you. Cars drive by and I swear it is you, or I will see someone on the street from behind and think you have come back. The rational part of me knows it is not you. But I am not satisfied until I have caught up with the car and see a stranger driving or walk up to the person and stare them in the eye. Chasing after strangers is not so good for me. They see a woman with no wedding band giving them an odd look and who knows what they are thinking. I am sure if I said, “Oh excuse me, I thought you were my dead husband,” that would stop them in their tracks. But I don’t say anything and usually just run the other way.

Maybe my subconscious is just so desperate to see you again that I am envisioning you everywhere. Maybe this is just part of the grieving process. All I know is the disappointment I feel when none of these people end up being you.

I woke up today so very unhappy. Each and every Saturday my first thought is that you killed yourself on a Saturday. I wish it wasn’t the first thing that goes through my mind, but it is. I don’t know how long this goes on for. I feel like every Saturday I wake up and relive your death. I stand in the shower crying until I turn into a prune and even then I don’t want to get out. To face another day without you – the pain just goes on and on.

Today should have been better than it was. We spent the day at a birthday party, a play and with all our wonderful friends. Yet I feel nothing – just numb and cold. I don’t even know how many weeks it has been since you died; thirteen maybe fourteen, I can’t remember. Keeping track of the weeks wasn’t helping, but forgetting seems almost worse. It feels like an eternity since you died. If feels like it just happened. Today is simply another day I try to get through without you. This is all I feel.

I sat in the middle of the play at 4 pm. I knew exactly when it turned 4 without ever looking at the time. I knew it because all of a sudden I started to get anxious and tears rolled down my face and I had to actually think about taking breaths to get the moment to pass. I looked around the room and saw everyone from my community and though it was filled with friends who love and care for me; all I really saw was that you weren’t there.

Life is just beginning to get even more complicated – I can’t really get into it now. There is so much on the horizon, so much in limbo that I don’t know how I am going to get through this. To be honest, I just don’t want to deal with any of it.

I want my old life back. When I look back I wonder what I even cared about or worried about, before death became the central focus of everything. I wonder how I could have ever complained about anything when I had it so freaking good. Why didn’t I appreciate my life a few months ago? Why didn’t I think I had it all?

I am tired of being unable to sleep and lie in bed at night worrying about every little thing. I am worried about my children and that I am not good enough to do this by myself. That someday when they are older they will blame me for everything that has gone wrong in their life. I will probably blame myself too.

No one has mentioned daddy all week. I used to complain about the crying every night and now I am worried when it stops. I know they don’t feel what I feel – I go through moments of feeling nothing and then I feel everything all at once.

I am consumed with guilt and sorrow and stress and more sorrow and I hate this person who I am right now. I hate feeling so bad all of the time and so tired and so very, very, very lost.

Sometimes I want to scream at the world for killing my husband and stealing my children’s innocent childhood. But who this tirade is intended for, I am not sure. I am just looking for someone to blame other than myself – other than my husband. I am looking for some way to make this insanity all go away.

I have been trying to look forward and not look back or even look at the present, but even this seems impossible. I guess I hope and pray that there will be a moment in time where I feel all the pain I am supposed to be feeling and then it will go away.

When I do feel your absence it is awful. When I suppress my reality it feels worse. The only constant in my life right now is this freezing cold weather that numbs me inside and out and I am just tired of feeling lost and out of sync with myself.

I just keep hoping the next person I stop on the street will be you.