If I Could Save Time In A Bottle

 

This is where I live now. In sadness. With time as my enemy. It drags on. All day long, every single day since the doctor called and said you would not survive, I have been immersed in the dark waters of grief. Sometimes I feel like I’m drowning, like when a memory surfaces to remind me of what I’ve lost. But that only happens every other minute of every single day. On the off minutes I tread water and try to catch my breath before another wave of sorrow hits me in the face and threatens to wash me out to sea.

Some people reassure me that I’m going to be okay. But I don’t feel like I’m going to be okay. I don’t think I will ever get over losing you, Rob. My rock. My baby. My love. Oh, my darling love. I miss you desperately. Missing you isn’t a strong enough description. I ache for you. Bending over, sobbing out every ounce of air in my lungs until I come up for air and do it all again. And again. And again.

How could there be that many tears inside of me, all flooding out each day? If my heart were a river, it should have run dry by now. Instead, it’s a bottomless spring of heartache and pain, always seeping out, never far from the surface, bursting its fragile boundaries like a geyser right when I least expect it.

I never knew such grief existed. I’m ashamed of all the lithe, careless, poetic sympathy cards I’ve naively sent to my suffering friends when life tore away their own true loves. Or parents. Or babies. “I’m so sorry, but I’m praying you will find comfort in the arms of Jesus,” my manufactured pen writes, gliding glibly across the manufactured card I bought at the drugstore on my way to the mailbox where I dropped off my obligatory pseudo-comfort. I was ignorant. I was pretentious. I was whole. Back then when I had all the right answers to questions no one had ever asked me before. You know, when I had all the time in the world.

I’ve received cards like that, now that I am that woman. The one whose world exploded into unrecognizable fragments last month, like a tornado shredding an innocent town before it skips away to do it all again. “So sorry for your loss,” wrote a long-ago acquaintance I haven’t seen in twenty years. “We’re all sorry for your loss,” scribbled the employer whose track record belies his attempt at sympathy. “God knows best,” some present in a weak attempt at spirituality. “He’s in a better place,” another reassures—without me, I immediately think, even though I told you we were supposed to kick off together so I wouldn’t find myself left behind, suffocating in this goulash of conflicting emotions. “Your memories will comfort you,” anonymous Hallmark writers gush with no concept of the gut-wrenching pain accompanying those memories. Christmases I once shared with you are gone forever. The inside jokes are no more. Desperately I search my phone for videos of your smile and your voice, longing to hear you say something, anything, no matter how insignificant.

Word to the wise—take more photos. Film more videos. Make the one you love talk to you on camera and save it forever. I haven’t heard Roby’s voice since the day I left the hospital, on my way to my own recovery. In the Age of Covid, when the man you love spends every second for four weeks trying to breathe in a lonely hospital room, visitors aren’t allowed and conversation is a technological impossibility. I’d give anything in the world to hear him tell me once more how much he loves me. Or to stop filming him.

I’d give even more for one minute to feel his arms around me again. Instead, I smell his favorite jacket and pretend I’m burying my face in his shoulder once more. I sleep with his t-shirt and pretend his arms are around me. In the morning I refold it the way I used to fold his laundry for forty-four years and put it back under my pillow where it waits patiently until it’s time to use it to dry my tears. Tonight. When I sleep alone again.

This is hell, this unexpected loss and its accompanying grief. “It’s going to take a long time,” they tell me. It’s already taking a long time. Every day feels like a year since the last time you smiled, held me in your arms, kissed my lips, told me you love me. Every morning the sun rises without the sense God gave it, pretending that everything will look brighter today in its beaming renewal, forgetting that from the moment my eyes open until hours later when exhaustion brings its solitary relief, this is only the beginning of a long day of missing you. Longing for what I can never have again. Regretting all the moments I was too distracted to bask in your generous love. And wondering how I am ever going to live without you in a world where I feel as disconnected as an alien on a foreign planet.

I miss you, Baby. Like the ocean would miss the shore. And I’m drowning in my sorrow with no hope of a rescue. Katy said we’re all just trying to stop the bleeding. So true. Half of me is gone, viciously torn away, leaving me alone here, violated, shattered, bleeding out. But I’ll be all right eventually. In time. Everyone says so. Just as soon as I forget how I was perfectly loved once. As soon as the memory of you fades enough to soften my sorrow. When I stop trying to remember what you smelled like or sounded like or the way your eyes softened when you looked at me and how your laughter diluted my worries. Just as soon as time heals all my wounds.

That’s what the Hallmark cards say, anyway. It just takes time.