Life Goes On ™️

I wake up every morning, begrudgingly. I've been staying at my younger daughter and son-in-law’s home for the summer and even though the sun pushes through the blinds most days in my bedroom, it still feels dark and gloomy in my soul because I never planned for this life.  I am a prisoner to my circumstances now.   When I manage to get my body out of bed, I go make my cup of coffee.  I think about the mornings I spent with Mark, having our coffee together.  Every day he would be reading the news on his phone and eating his Special K cereal while I would be playing word games on my phone. We would be doing different things, but we were together; I was his; he was mine…. for 45 years.  In all those 45 years, there were very few things that interested both him and me. I used to tell people, “we don’t like the same things, but we do like each other”.  It was that kind of love story.   Each and every day, now, I have to adjust to this new life....

It has been a year since the day that turned my life into before and after .  It all began in December 2022, when Mark, my husband, and I took our whole family on a cruise celebrating my retirement, my younger daughter's engagement and my older daughter's 40th birthday.  Everything was perfect, until... the last port we stopped at, when Mark told me he hadn't been feeling well.  Eight months later we all were weeping in a room in intensive care at Duke University Hospital, after his life support was turned off.  I will never forget the moment Brodie, his nurse, gently put his hand on my back and whispered to me, "He's gone."  Today marks a year since I became a half who is no longer part of a whole, since I am no longer part of a couple. There is always an empty chair when I go out with my married friends and then there's the few married friends who no longer invite me out.  People also look at me differently; I see the pity in their expressions, or someti...