(I’m way behind the essay a week writing challenge, and have
clearly not kept up with the daily Blogging AtoZ Challenge for April. So I will
combine the two for my essays and try to catch up, which could mean writing two
or three essays a week for the rest of the year. Haven’t checked a calendar yet
for a real schedule.)
My husband died last year. I keep saying that, and it’s
probably getting boring for other people. But it still feels like the most important
thing that’s happened in my life recently.
It was a
moment, the moment Jack died. Up until that moment, our lives were entwined. We
were not the joined-at-the-hip type of couple, like my husband’s brother and
his wife. We had our own friends, we traveled separately often, we shared
housework—and we kept our money separate. He went to the gym almost every day,
I went maybe three times a week. But we both loved baseball and went to games
together, went to the movies, had some friends in common. And we were both
storytellers, though he was much better than me.
When he got
sick and said things like “if I’m here next year,” I ignored the implication. I
continued to believe our “moments before,” alive, would go on forever. Denial,
much? It’s the “moments after” that continue to mount up, to add on, to move me
steadily away from those moments when Jack was alive.
Yet I have
to keep on keepin’ on. Remembering the past is not the same as living in the
past. But integrating the past into the continually-moving-forward present is a
paradox when one member of that past is no longer present to continue that
work. His memories have evaporated, or live, imperfectly, in the memories of
others. I don’t want to be stuck in the past, I don’t want to lose the past,
and I want to keep on keepin’ on with the past as companion.
#52essays2017
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