counting years...

January 1 doesn’t mark the beginning of each new year, not for me. July 19, 2019 ended that year, that era, that lifetime. The next day, July 20, marked the new year and new life before us, one in which our children had no father and I found myself cloaked with a new word: widow.

Every year now, July 19 is my December 31 and July 20 is January 1. 

The ending of another year we survived without him. The beginning of another year we’ll have to.

His beach trip bag is stuffed in the back of our closet, unpacked. A small laundry bag of dirty clothes rest next to it, and I still can’t wash them or move them or throw them out. Some of his t-shirts are still on shelves, a few still smelling like him. 

Some things have changed forever. Some never will. His dog quivers with joy whenever a men enters our home. She laid at the door for months after he died, waiting for him to come home. A part of her still waits, I think. Our children share the same laugh, same curiosity about how the world works, and so many of the same idiosyncrasies, mirrored from their dad. I know I can be loved, deeply, unreservedly. I didn’t know that before him.

I’m beginning to forget his touch on my skin, and I grieve anew at that loss. Not his hugs, those I can still summon, but the everyday glancing blows between the bodies of two lovers who know each other inside and out.

He didn’t know how loved he was. He wanted to love people perfectly, and he was not gentle with his imperfectly human soul when he thought he had failed. I wish I could have known how much more affirmation he needed, because I never lacked for the exquisite imperfection of his love.

I don’t celebrate new years, not the ones that launch on July 20. But the survival of the previous year, the perseverance of living another 365 days without his breath? This I celebrate and mourn in the dance of both/and.

Every July 19 feels like leaving the ICU, the hospital, my friend Rachel’s van, to climb the stairs to our six beloveds who didn’t know that Daddy was dead. July 20 began the reporters on the lawn and the friends coming to town and the decisions that a wife shouldn’t have to make when we’re only 37. More than that, each new year of his absence starts like a muffled gunshot, tearing my heart to shreds but not making the sound other people would recognize as catastrophic.

No, most people think the catastrophe was in 2019. I miss those early days, the ones when everyone showed up and acknowledged my pain and understood why I might not communicate as effectively or promptly as I once did, why I don’t write apologies in the ashes left by my former life. 

Today, I sound dramatic to some people as I stumble over the words to try to explain, “I’m so sorry I missed that IEP meeting, but my husband died three years ago and I’m never going to get over it. Can we reschedule in hopes that the new date will be full enough of distractions that I can make it there?” 

They don’t understand. They don’t have to. They celebrate the new year in the winter, unaware that my year’s end and beginning come in 95 degree heat or hotter.

They think my life restarted that first July 20th. They don’t know I end in agony as I go to sleep to The West Wing because I need noise to avoid the volume of no breath sounds or snores next to me in my empty bed. They don’t know I begin painstakingly afresh every morning as I wake up on his side of the bed, mine unoccupied, in the room we planned to share for so many more years.

I have no “maybe this year will be better” hopes to express. The new year beginning this month will be terrible and wonderful, and I will celebrate the wonderful… but better would be having him in this year again. 

And better will never arrive.

But I’m finding some degree of hope in this heat, some promise in the faces of six children who were all 12 and younger when he died, four of them now teenagers, one taller than me, others close behind. I don’t know what hope will bring, don’t know what the unknown shadows have in store, but I have candles lit that will lead us somewhere.

Better? Honestly, I don’t know. But hope doesn’t always tell us what the days to come will hold. All I know is that as I stand on the cusp of another year, I know this one will bring more change.

I’ve hated change in the past. I still do, most days. But now I can accept what it brings, which is that today will pass and it might not be this hard forever. Hope is so fickle, but I’m looking forward the days and months and years to come, knowing with pain that they won’t hold Lee’s return but knowing the uncertainty will bring the certainty of changes. I’m no longer angry with my God, who is still certain ground to me even when nothing else is stable.

I am hurting today. And better would be almost anything else, so I await what might come with God and with hope, or something like it.

And for today, that’s enough.