One month
Before and after
I took Molly on a walk around the lake. The water is drained in the wintertime, so this spot where I swam with Eric last summer is just an empty bowl of snow.
I can’t scoop up some of the water and hope it maybe touched his body. I can’t see the rocks we picked our way through as we waded into the deep. I can’t tell where the shoreline began or find the place where we spread out our towels.
So I just stood in the snow and cried.
He was just here. He was alive and whole and warm and full of laughter.
It’s such a strange feeling to still be here when he is not. It’s the same city, the same air, the same sky, the same path, the same pet. But nothing is the same. I am not the same. I will never be the same again.
It feels strangely appropriate that it’s wintertime. Everything is cold and dead and dark and biting. It’s like my little corner of the world is mourning with me. Part of me wishes it would stay winter for always.
My heart is shattered, but so is my mind. My brain can’t make sense of this. It can’t understand.
Though… there are moments when I’m folding laundry or walking out to the mailbox when it feels real. When I think to myself, “Eric is really gone. He’s not going to drive into the garage or walk through the side door. This is my life now.” These are not moments when I’m crying, but just… living. Continuing to live, I suppose. These are moments when the stark “before” and “after” of my life feels like something so tangible I could hold it in my hands. Even now, I can almost feel the cool stone under my fingers; a two-sided monument marking the life I lived and the life I now must live without him.
Tonight around 10pm, it will be a whole month since Eric died. A whole month since part of me died, too.
“There are losses that rearrange the world. Deaths that change the way you see everything, grief that tears everything down. Pain that transports you to an entirely different universe, even while everyone else thinks nothing has really changed.”
–Megan Devine, It’s OK That You’re Not OK