I lost my wife one year and eight months ago. Before she was my wife, she was my girlfriend. Before she was my girlfriend, she was my best friend. And before she was my best friend, I was in high school. She’s been the most important person in my life for literally all of my adulthood.
We both were fairly dysfunctional. We just understood each other though. We’d been through all the same shit. Childhood abuse and neglect, mental illness, drug abuse. All the things that made us each individually felt isolated us turned out to be things we had in common. When we were together, when it was just us, we could take off the masks and drop the act and just be the broken people that we were. Do you know what a relief that was? All the ugly scary parts of ourselves that we had to hide from the rest of the world, we never had to hide from each other. We could roll up our sleeves and show our scars (I mean that both literally and figuratively) and, instead of recoiling in horror, the other would smile in recognition and show their own.
We used to joke that, between the two of us, we made one halfway-functional adult. It wasn’t really a joke though. We leaned on each other. We never had to learn how to stand on our own. Letting her cover for my weaknesses is the only coping mechanism I’ve ever learned. And covering for hers is the only responsibility I’ve ever embraced. We were each other’s crutch, only now she’s been pulled out from under me and I’ve fallen flat on my face. We knew perfectly well how unhealthy our dependence on each other was. We talked about it sometimes. Those talks always ended with “we’ll always have each other, so why should we care?”
This. This is why we should care.
Underneath the grief, under the pain and the sadness and the guilt and the regret, there’s a deep and intense anger at her for leaving me all alone like this. This wasn’t the fucking deal.
The worst, cruelest, hardest part about losing her is that the world didn’t just end when she did. It keeps going. Time keeps passing. Life keeps beating me over the head, harder and harder, with shit I need to deal with and I keep asking myself how I’m supposed to do it without her and the only thing I can do is cry and say “I don’t know.”
We both were fairly dysfunctional. We just understood each other though. We’d been through all the same shit. Childhood abuse and neglect, mental illness, drug abuse. All the things that made us each individually felt isolated us turned out to be things we had in common. When we were together, when it was just us, we could take off the masks and drop the act and just be the broken people that we were. Do you know what a relief that was? All the ugly scary parts of ourselves that we had to hide from the rest of the world, we never had to hide from each other. We could roll up our sleeves and show our scars (I mean that both literally and figuratively) and, instead of recoiling in horror, the other would smile in recognition and show their own.
We used to joke that, between the two of us, we made one halfway-functional adult. It wasn’t really a joke though. We leaned on each other. We never had to learn how to stand on our own. Letting her cover for my weaknesses is the only coping mechanism I’ve ever learned. And covering for hers is the only responsibility I’ve ever embraced. We were each other’s crutch, only now she’s been pulled out from under me and I’ve fallen flat on my face. We knew perfectly well how unhealthy our dependence on each other was. We talked about it sometimes. Those talks always ended with “we’ll always have each other, so why should we care?”
This. This is why we should care.
Underneath the grief, under the pain and the sadness and the guilt and the regret, there’s a deep and intense anger at her for leaving me all alone like this. This wasn’t the fucking deal.
The worst, cruelest, hardest part about losing her is that the world didn’t just end when she did. It keeps going. Time keeps passing. Life keeps beating me over the head, harder and harder, with shit I need to deal with and I keep asking myself how I’m supposed to do it without her and the only thing I can do is cry and say “I don’t know.”
