I wrote the italicized text below late last night after I paid my rent online. It's the start of another month. Sunday night, the cusp between May 3 and May 4, my husband will have been deceased three months. It seems like forever and it seems like nothing. Some days I can handle my grief. Some days I can find my way. Other days I can't. It is like what C. S. Lewis wrote about. Grief comes back and sometimes the scenery is different but a lot of times its the same thing. I am trying so desperately to move through this, not past because I don't see how I can ever get past his death. But I know i need to find a balance. Writing is giving me a voice that no one else, no where else can hear but here. No one knows me here but everyone can see my pain. The widows I have met tell me it doesn't get better, you just adapt to living. Great. I want to find the candle in the darkness. I want to be the candle, but I am only the darkness still. Maybe one day I will find a light and can crawl towards it. Then I might be able to take that light and make it brighter so I am the veteran of grief that someone else can move towards.

Be the candle. It's not a great mantra but in the darkness, it's the only one I want.

I can only hope reading about my roller coaster grief will help someone else. I'm not the candle yet. I'm only a voice in the dark. But it's a start.

My husband died. It was sudden by the truest definition of the word. He went to sleep and was gone in under ten minutes. Asleep one moment, gasping the next, lost to me forever somewhere in the next two. Sudden. Without warning. I lost him. I lost the one person whom I could love and who loved me. Lost.

I lost my husband. That is such an odd euphemism for death. He isn’t lost. I know where his body is. He is ashes in a black box with his name on it. His medals, his dog tags, and his flag surround it. It’s folded so that all you see is the field of blue and the embroidered white stars. My Marine. My husband. My soul mate.

“Oh, you lost your husband. I’m sorry.” Really? How sorry? Sorry enough to come sit with me and talk to me? To listen to me? How sorry are you? How sympathetic do you feel? How empathetic? Enough to know that it is not he that is lost, but I? I am lost. I am without him.

I lost my best and only friend. He went where I am not allowed to go just yet. He went on ahead of me and I am left here on this road and I’ve lost my way. I can’t find him. I lost my heart and most of my soul. I dropped them along the way back there, somewhere between the moment the doctor came out and told me there was nothing she could do and the few minutes I took walking out of the church to the car after his funeral carrying his ashes and his flag. I think they might be there. Maybe they are in the hospital parking lot after I had to leave him there to be picked up by the funeral home. To be honest I haven’t bothered nor cared to look. My feeling right now is, “Why bother?” He is not with me and I have no need of those parts of my heart and soul. Those parts had been reserved exclusively for him. Life has forever changed for me and I am so different. He wouldn’t know me, and that makes me crumple inside.

I’m the one who is lost. I don’t recognize where I am. Nothing is familiar anymore. Where I used to walk a small seaside community, I walk concrete and asphalt. Where I used to see waves either gently caressing rocks and sand or pounding explosively, I see buildings and shopping centers that trap pockets of trees and grass. I hear car horns and sirens instead of wind and ocean waves. The birds that live here call but they don’t cry like seagulls do; that lonely lament sent out to a lonely sea and sky. It is hauntingly beautiful to see and hear a lone gull send its cry into the infinite. My husband and I would feel its solitary existence in our souls and join hands to reassure each other that we had each other. But there is no longer a hand for me to reach for. He has died and I am lost. So very lost.

Christians believe that Jesus Christ is the Way, the Truth, and the Light. I am trying to find my way. The truth of my life right now is devastating. I cannot find a light to walk towards. I pray more often than everyday. I pray throughout the day it seems, but I hear nothing in the silence of the room and I’m afraid to tempt myself with belief in mere signs. I grasp the promise that I will see my husband again like a small child grabs a blanket. I hold it close and cry into the folds of that promise as if my life depended on it. And right now it does. It’s all I have since he has died.

I wonder if someday, if I find myself, I can get back on that path to being allowed to be with him. Only then, when his hand is back holding mine, will I no longer feel lost.

I love you, husband.