There are those days when I wake and am surprised that I am lying alone in my bed. I look around. Everything is familiar, as it should be after so many years. I don’t rush to get up. I don’t have to be anywhere. I am carefully settled on my side of the bed. The covers and pillows on the other side are unmoved. I think there is some goal I’m supposed to have about sleeping in the center of my bed, so I can own it and be a full person. A positive step in my grief process. I don’t care one bit about that stuff. I am whole. Whole on my side of the bed as MichaeI was whole on his side. The idea that a bed is imbued with such power is ridiculous to me.
I glance over at the photos of Michael on my bookshelf, the ones on my left. He smiles at me with his usual half-smile. The one that’s slightly sardonic and tender and loving and of course, truly aware of who he is smiling at – me. I still think that he is the only person who’s ever known me in my entirety and accepted me completely.
I expect that makes me lucky. I’ve spent a lifetime probing the depths of me. He came along for the trips. And he stayed next to me. Thinking about that elicits a hunger for being that well-known. It’s best to move on from there. So I look around and my mind is aimless.
I wonder what I’m supposed to do today. No job any more. Work is what I choose to do. I have to take care of the living creatures in my house, the dog, the fish, the plants. And there is outside, the garden and the birds. But I don’t have to rush. I feel my body and inspect it. I’m healing from my knee replacement surgery. It’s taking awhile before my tissues can absorb the blood from the bruises on my leg and the bruises on my arms where the nurses failed to place an IV.
Age. Aging is my condition despite my apparent resiliency. I don’t have to look hard for its evidence. My skin is getting thinner, crepey. Tasks that I could do in a snap take longer. I remember my mother talking about how changing sheets seemed to take forever. I’m understanding that better now. Although I can still move relatively quickly, by comparison to ten years ago, my pace is glacial. I need to find a graceful way to accept that.

More remarkable are the parts of me that still appear youthful. My skin is still soft and pliant and moisture-filled in many places. I admire it and wonder at it. Michael said my skin was like velvet. Genetics. My father’s face was oily and unlined when he died. My mother looked years younger than her 90’s. They are in me forever.
The silence in this cavernous space that I love is palpable. For hours and hours every day there is no noise other than that which I make or invite. I am not the person who turns on the television for all day company. Television is either void of anything interesting or filled with agitating news. I need to parse out what I give to agitation. The times are so wearing. I listen to music. Sometimes that feels great and other times I spin tangentially into the memories it evokes and I wail.
My phone rarely rings. My children text or call regularly. My sister, too. But otherwise I barely hear from anyone. I have friends who love me. But people my age are still very busy. Most of them are still partnered. They are involved in their lives together. As I would be with my partner, except he’s dead. This is as it should be. Michael simply died too soon. If I’d been 80 instead of 66 when he died this wouldn’t be as isolating. Death at 80 or so would be more common. I’d have other widows with whom to chat. But I know very few widows. Some that I know have already found new partners. I don’t want a new partner. Maybe if he’d died when we hadn’t already shared 45 years together I might have wanted someone eventually. That will never happen for me. I knew that from the beginning. We had a good life together. When the first round is magical it’s enough. I don’t have the tolerance or energy to try building another with a peer who carries scars as I do.
So I am here with myself. I know that because I have wide-ranging interests and an active intellect I am never bored. No conversation is still better than empty conversation. Still. What should I be doing? I feel so amorphous, just like I did when Michael first died. I’ve done so much since then and yet, the structures most of us live in, at least for this time, remain out of my reach. I suppose that means I’m done with them. After all, I’m not trying hard to build any. And I think I would if I really wanted or needed them. So I occupy this space. Life is now random and disordered. Except for my compulsion to write. I write all the time. I’m filling volumes.