My Wife Died a Month Ago

She died a little over a month ago.

It was in our living room. The one she decorated. The one we painted while our 8-month-old son sat in his bassinet. I can still see the shadows on the wall and the color we picked up for the room we would spend the majority of our family time in.

She’d left us on that Saturday but her organs kept her there, breathing, heavily for another 3 days.

The last moment I spent with her, I whispered next to her ear to make sure she could hear me, “Forever and Always”. There was nothing left for her to do — she had completed her journey. It was now time for her to go home.

“We were promised sufferings. They were part of the program. We were even told, ‘Blessed are they that mourn,’ and I accept it. I’ve got nothing that I hadn’t bargained for. Of course it is different when the thing happens to oneself, not to others, and in reality, not imagination.”
― C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

She died too young. 34 to be exact.

But there is no fairness in cancer. There is little to no mercy. The ones who do manage to escape are still burdened with the fears that they’ll never be able to live as free as they once had.

I’ve never had cancer but I’ve watched someone from start to finish be diagnosed and succumb to Its influence. Cancer is an evil we still don’t fully understand. Its thirst never satisfied until it's taken the final breath from its captive.

It’s a progression I’d felt coming. But no one can prepare you to watch your lover take their final. To watch them desperately suck in that final breath and watch the final exhale escape never to be returned. It’s an image that I’ll never be able to forget. It’s a feeling that I wouldn’t wish on anyone else.

But she was gone long before that last breath. She was gone far before we realized we were nearing the end. She was gone before Christmas, Thanksgiving, and even before our birthdays.

Again, cancer has no sympathy for any of us. It doesn’t much care if you have two kids under 6. Or that it’ll kill a child’s mother only a month before his 6th birthday. It doesn’t blink in the eyes of family or friends when their tears flood a home — watching someone they love slowly dissolve into nothing.

Fuck cancer.

Survivors look back and see omens, messages they missed. — Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

Even now, one month without her it doesn’t seem entirely real. There’s still a part of me that can’t fully come to grips that she’s gone for good. It’s a trick of the mind. And sometimes of the body. It doesn’t make much sense. But Of course, I know that these feelings aren’t “real” in their essence or existence.

She’s dead.

I’m left to raise our two kids.

I am now a widower, a label that isn’t particularly pleasant.

It’s not like anyone is going to introduce me at parties as “The Widower”. But they will whisper to one another, “he lost his wife not long ago, I can’t even imagine.” And they shouldn’t. Why go through the pain if it isn’t real? I wouldn’t if I didn’t need to.

One thing I have noticed, for those brave enough to speak with me, particularly those of a certain age, ones nearing death faster than they’d like, making them have to confront something I already have, is the admiration they have for me. They compliment me as though it's a compliment that I’m grateful to take. In one way or another, I am -but still, I wish I didn’t have to accept. They know that I just walked through something they might have too soon. They look at me and see someone in their 30’s — and then they try and place themselves in my position.

“What would I have done?”

“How would I have reacted?”

“Could I have held it together as he did?”

The problem that none of them see though is the lenses they look at themselves with. When any of us look back we now have the benefit of knowing what we do now. So the version we see of ourselves in the past is never one that knew as much as we do now. Which in turn creates doubt that we would have been capable of handling circumstances that were never laid at their feet.

You can’t imagine what I’ve gone through because you’ve never gone through it.

But at some point, you will.

We all will. Or we will put someone else through what I went through. Losing someone you love not by choice but by circumstance. Stolen away before you were able to live the life you wanted to. Before they got to watch their children grow up. Before they got to play with their grandkids.

I don’t know that I’ll ever be at peace with her death. Cancer has a way of making you doubt everything and anything. But what I really mean to say is that I’ll never get over how unfair it is that she is gone. That her kids were stolen from her, and her from her children.

She’s only been gone a month — but it already feels like forever.