All I want

Since you died. All I want is to see you again, to have you tell me your secrets about where you were, what you learned and how you can teach me what I need to know to remain living here without you. We would have so much to talk about. I have done so much since you have left. I have lived a whole lifetime, years of moving on without you, of living. I have traveled across this country more than once, traveled to Europe once. I have re learned how to cook, tended our house alone, sold our house, witnessed two births, two marriages of our children. I have changed focus in my job, found new friends, dated, learned so many hard lessons. Cried so many tears, felt so much loneliness.  All this, yet I am the same me that you left. I still need you, your touch, your gentle way of telling me what I need to know without hurting my feelings. I still need my feet rubbed, I still need someone to make tea for me. I still need to roll over at night to you.

It occurred to me the other day while I looked at this picture of you on the wall. No one lived with me longer than you, no one. Not my parents, not our children. You were the human being who lived with me the longest. The one who knew all my idiosyncrasies, habits, flaws, good and bad points. I knew all this about you too. And I am forgetting. This adds to the loneliness. The sound of your voice is slipping a bit, the sounds you made in the kitchen as you prepped for the Sunday dinner. The way our hands felt together when we danced. It is slipping. And I have only had a handful of dreams of you. I forget to pray for more in my weariness at night sometimes. Despite knowing prayer wouldn't change that, I forget.

All I want is for you to show up in my bathroom, sit on the toilet seat and talk to me while I bath, say "Sue honey, I know how hard it is, remember I am without you too, I know honey". I want to look up from my book and see you standing there with that smile on your face that says- I love doing this for you - as you hand me the hot tea, handle toward me as you delicately hold the rim so as not to burn your hand. I want to see the wide grin that reveals the missing back tooth - too expensive to fix in our poverty days, so you had it pulled- a testament to your selflessness because that is the kind of guy you were. I want to be mad at you for hiding down on the beach on the rocks at camp and not socializing with us on the deck, to come across you throwing rocks on the beach in your baggy bathing suit shorts and bitch at you about it and hear you say, "oh Sue leave me alone". I want to see you doze off watching the movie, or ask you what they said  at the important part and you say "I don't know I didn't hear it". I would give my right arm to be irritated again like I was about that.

Processes and forces of grief and living without you bring me back to these things I want. Dealing- sans alcohol, cigarettes, antidepressants, and avoidance's of every description and here it comes. The cruelty and finality of death denies me my desire. It doesn't matter how much I want this, how much I miss you and all you did for me and I for you, I will not ever have it again. In that kernel of bitter truth somewhere lies the all consuming overarching death anxiety. It does not matter how well or poorly I grieve for you, go through the process, do what is needed- I still just want you. But I can't have you, I will never have you again. It is over. I feel my chest fill with the heaviness that makes me try to catch my breath, to push it off me, to make it stop. I feel the hot sting of the tears, the burn as they well behind the ducts wanting to come out. The sorrow in the broken heart that feels like I want to fall to the floor. The flash in my mind of your body doing something, smiling at me, living with me, in time past. This grief, this widow's experience, this new life I didn't chose.

And in the end if I don't go there- I still just want you. And if I go there- I still just want you.