days

One month ago, 31 days, the world turned upside down. 

Not a good day today, but there are no good days.    There are worse days and worst days. 

Which brings up the conversations I had and still have.  "I'm sorry for your loss," they say.  Or, "My condolences."  Then when signing off they say "Have a great day!"  Or, "Have a wonderful day!"  There are no great days any more, or wonderful ones, and the worst days of more than a month ago seem beatific in comparison.     

I wish I could turn back the clock.  When I look at something dated, bearing a date more than a month ago, I yearn for the past, to become part of the past, to live there forever--or to change certain critical events that led up to what happened a month ago. 

My link to reality is less strong than it probably looks.   I could so easily drift into a universe where my wife is alive and a month ago never happened or happened differently.  Or I could talk to my wife and hear her answering me and walking beside me.    So tempting to just let that happen.  But I know she is gone and morover I feel she is gone.  The presence that was there in my head up until a month ago is not there now.  Which is probably just my way of looking at things, though I send out tendrils of thought to explore and searh for her presence;  I await the ghostly brush of her hand, her presence in dreams, the sound of breathing next to me.   I don't remember any dream I have had recently, but I don't think my wife was in them.   I wish she were.

One aspect of my unstable grasp on reality is that I have never had a personal loss anywhere like this before.  My grandfather died 52 years ago; that is my only experience with something like this.   It is hard for me to understand fully that I cannot change things by closing my eyes and crossing my fingers and hoping very hard, or by pressing a reset button on a game machine.   But no, that doesn't work here.  Wish it would. 

On my way downtown today I passed the newly landscaped building that my wife wanted to take a picture of a couple of days before she left on the plane.   I walked on the same sidewalks that my wife and had walked on.  Probably there are residues from our shoes that linger in those places that bloodhound might scent and identify.   I went to the bakery that I liked to take my wife to.  Everywhere memories.  

I saw a construction sign that read "Delano & Mackenzie."   Flashback to 2001 when my wife and I were walking on a street in Miami at night.  Across from where we walked, a big block of stone in the shadows of the evening, there was the Hotel Delano, that we looked at curiously. 

I could leave town and go somewhere neither of us ever went before and she would still be there.    There is no escape.

There is little that I do that does not evoke ghosts and memories of my wife.  I did pick up a book by Lincoln Child that kept me distracted, until it grew weak at the end.   Some of the other books I have been reading were read by my wife, which is little help at all.