A Lifetime

It hits you like a brick to the chest - no a locomotive to the chest - suffocates you until you're sure that you'll die of lack of oxygen before the pain has a chance to kill you first. And in that moment, when you realize you just lost everything you ever had worth losing, it suddenly becomes crystal clear that without this pain, without this suffocation, you would have absolutely nothing left to feel.  

I'm not sure if that realization changed the way I grieved, but the people around me seemed so much more hyper-sensitive than I did. People would talk about her, without thinking, and then quickly apologize. I wanted to remember her, because it wasn't the memories that hurt. What hurt was the thought that I wasn't going to get any more memories with her. That lost future was what hurt the worst.  

At her funeral, I gave a nice speech about how beautiful she was and how amazingly strong, especially when compared to all of us. By 'us' I meant me, but it felt selfish to say so, since this funeral was meant for those left behind to grieve her death. I didn't cry there, at the funeral, but when I was alone I cried. And I don't believe all that crap about tough guys saying you're supposed to be macho or whatever just because you're the male of the species. You lose the woman you love; you're going to cry until you've got nothing left.  

Then I started to wonder where she was, if she was watching me now, like the guardian angels everyone hears about as a kid. Was she in heaven, with all the other dead relatives she had? Or was she anywhere but in the ground? So, to keep my mind busy, I started to Google all the different places you could go after you died. Greeks believed that after death, everyone went to the underworld, where they were judged on the sort of person they had been in life. After judgment, you were sent to the place best suited to your temperament. I read that ancient Egyptians believed the afterlife was a whole different world. Some pharaohs were even buried with life-sized stone armies, because the Egyptians believed that they would be reanimated in the afterlife, ready to serve their king. Then there was reincarnation and rebirth. Then some believed there was nothing at all.  

What had she believed? We had never discussed it before. It seemed like a question she would ask, but somehow it had never come up in conversation.

It didn't really matter what I believed because I wanted to go wherever she was.  

If I could no longer be with her here, when I died, did I at least get to be with her there? Wherever 'there' was.  

I knew she wouldn't have wanted me to think that. Actually she wouldn't have even wanted me to think about my own death in general, even though somewhere, someday we both knew I was going to die and so was she. But neither of us expected it to happen how it did, as soon as it did. I didn't even expect her to be the one pass first.

I assumed, when I was old and bald and wrinkly with age, I would be the one to die before her. Probably of a heart attack or some other medical death sentence that came from eating too much salty, fat-filled junk food. And, because we'd had so much time together, and because she was the more graceful of the two of us, she would mourn my death and soon after she would follow me because she was old too so our time had waned.

But that would only have been after we'd had a lifetime together.