Losing Tom after fifty years, and learning to carry a grief that does not get smaller, only more familiar.
Tom died in the spring, after fifty years of marriage, and I am not going to pretend to you that there is a tidy thing to say about it. There is not.
It was not sudden, which people tell you is a mercy, and it is, and it also is not. We had time, which meant we had time to be afraid. But we also had time to say things, and we said them, all of them, so that when the morning came there was nothing left unsaid between us. I have spoken to a great many widows in my life, in my work, and I know now what I only understood in part before: it is the unsaid things that haunt people. We had none, and that has been my comfort.
The first year, I kept making tea for two. I would catch myself reaching for the second cup and have to put it back. I kept the radio on all the time because the silence had a shape I could not bear. Grief is not what people think. It does not get smaller. You do not get over it, the way you get over a cold. What happens is that you get bigger around it. The grief stays exactly the size it was, and slowly, slowly, you grow a life wide enough to carry it without it being the only thing.
My children wanted me to move, to somewhere smaller, somewhere sensible. I would not. This is the house we filled, and his coat is still on the hook by the door, and I am not ready and I may never be, and that is allowed. We are allowed to keep the coat.
I will say one more thing, because it is true and because you may need it one day. The love does not leave when the person does. It has nowhere to go, so it stays. Some days that is the hardest part, and some days it is the only thing holding me up. Both of those are true at once, and you learn to live in that.