Alone - Part 3

Alone – part 3 -

Bed times are bad times.  I am very tired.  I procrastinate.  Odd, since I always go to bed an hour or two before him anyway.  What’s different?  The knowledge that he will not join me, he will not be there in the morning. 

I have been mentally preparing for this for nearly six years, since the first heart attack nearly killed him.  And then the chest infection tried hard to take him away.  Then the pneumonia, which nearly succeeded.  The diabetic coma tried to claim him but failed, so did another heart attack, and another.  But between us, we managed to stay happy and optimistic and carry on.  Until now.  Another chest infection and his heart called it quits.  It stopped.  I am alone.  Weeping in private,  crying for me because I am truly alone for the first time in my life.

I consider why I am crying like this.  I have lost friends, father, mother, grand-daughter, and I cried.  I mourned, I grieved.  We mourned and grieved.  But this distress is quite different, deeper, harder, it hurts more.  This is my husband, our lives were totally connected, inter-twined, connected.  We both knew what the other wanted, what the other was thinking, often with no words spoken.  Sixty years of knowing each other, 55 years of marriage and learning to live as one, and now I have to learn to live as just me.  Six years of mental rehearsal did not prepare me well enough for being truly alone.