Verified by 
Key points
- Now, three years in, my grief feels different: the pain more muted, but the sense of loss more profound.
- Grief can start with numbness, but we feel more and more as time passes.
- Sometimes at night, I would slide a foot across the bed just to touch his foot, to feel him there.
It’s an ever-shifting, evolving, swirling, day-by-day, minute-by-minute emotion.
Our brains kindly dole the pain of grief out slowly, in doses we can manage. It often starts with numbness. In the months right after Tom died, I felt the hurt through a thick layer of protective padding. I knew it was there and feared it, but it lurked within a fog of disbelief. Sometimes I pictured it as a Godzilla-like monster behind me from which I was safe as long as I didn’t look back. I knew the pain was there and couldn’t be avoided forever but ran from it as best I could—even literally, on a monthlong road trip, fleeing the memory-filled home we shared for all those years.
But of course, the monster eventually caught me, and the many months that followed were full-immersion pain that coursed like glass shards through my veins. It throbbed in my head and behind my eyes any time it wasn’t spilling out in tears. It haunted my dreams from which I awoke sobbing and rendered even the sunniest mornings dark. (“The nightmare you wake up to, instead of from,” a friend said.) These were the months of wailing and despair and Xanax. I functioned but was wrapped in a shroud of misery.
Then the adjustment
With time, grief’s sharpest edges dulled, and I grew more accustomed to living solo. I kept busy, seeing friends, taking on projects, and taking trips. I filled up my life, pushing the grief to the back of my mind as much as possible and focusing my attention outward. Even so, Tom lingered in all my thoughts and everything I did, the sadness a constant buzz. It had turned perhaps from a giant lizard to a hornet, waiting to sting if I let my guard down. I had to be vigilant. I avoided some places and activities we enjoyed together, and tread carefully through others that I was loathe to give up despite the pain. I would go see live music, for example, but invariably cried on my solitary drive home. (True confession: I still do.)
In this period of adjustment, I got my feet back under me, figured out who my support network was, started figuring out what I wanted to do with my time (a work in progress), and learned how to manage the house alone (a huge hassle).
The subtleties of what I miss
Now, three years in, my grief feels different again. While the pain is more muted, the sense of loss has grown more profound, and more nuanced. Early on, the shock of suddenly being alone was almost abstract. The loss was a yawning abyss, sucking into it everything I had ever known or expected of my life and my future. I was suddenly untethered, hurtling into the unknown, reeling through space and time, everything blurred by pain and tears.
Now, I feel like I’ve climbed out of the abyss and regained my balance, but at the same time, my yearning feels more specific. It is about being without Tom in very particular ways, as if the details of our life together that got swamped from my memory by the enormity of my loss are rising to the surface again. My brain must think I’m ready.
The texture of my life has changed quite a lot. I am actually busier than before, seeing more people and doing more things to keep loneliness at bay as much as possible. I’m having a pretty good time, but still…
I have missed Tom’s physical presence from the moment I lost him. That was part of the abyss. Sometimes at night, I would slide a foot across the bed just to touch his foot, to feel him there. I miss that as much as kisses and hugs.
Now I find myself just as often yearning for our casual weeknight dinners at local joints, with easy, sometimes random conversation and no need to be “on.” It is the nothing-specialness of marriage that is so very special and impossible to replicate.
I miss the way he used to find music he thought I might like. And his stories about the customers who came into his picture-framing shop; my world feels busier but also smaller without that. I miss his breakfast tacos. I miss him noodling on an acoustic guitar at the kitchen table while he watched TV. I miss his deep, grumbly voice.
And I miss seeing myself through his eyes; I want to be the person he saw, and I’m not sure how. The me I was within the context of we is different from the me I am alone. I miss that other me. I miss the feeling of feeling known. Nobody ever has or will know me as Tom did.
Learning what I love
Shocking to think of now, but in the days right after Tom died, I imagined filling that empty space in the bed next to me as quickly as possible. It seems I felt the space more powerfully than I even felt the man who once occupied it. That, of course, didn’t last—thank goodness. There are legions of men standing by to take advantage of widows’ needs and vulnerabilities.
But now, the more time passes, the less possible it feels that I could ever fill that space and love again the way I loved Tom. And in a way, that’s true; our love was specific to us. It was not generic love nor is it generic loss. It was our love, and it was Tom, specifically. As I excavate my grief more deeply, I am feeling the loss in different ways. I am remembering more exactly the ways that he made me happy, made me feel seen and known, made me feel like I mattered, and how it felt to make him happy.
This is painful (what about grief isn’t?) but it’s also—I think, I hope—revealing the details of what I value in my relationships and in my life. And in that way, it seems I am evolving along with my grief.
