u/AllTheLoveNotHer

I’ve found a lot of her writing. Fits and starts of journals mostly. She was working through a lot of stuff and I found her notes from therapy. I never would have looked at these when she still alive, but the dead get no privacy, the living need truth.

She felt she was a burden to me. She wrote about it a lot. Her fear of becoming a burden. Of me becoming her caretaker. We had spoken about it and I had dismissed it perhaps a bit too carelessly. I never minded caring for her while she was sick. While we worked yet another health problem. While she recovered from another surgery. I loved her and we don’t care about caring for those we love. She wanted me to live a happier life. How could I without her?

But I just couldn’t find any of her writing saying she loved me.

She kept so many of the things I wrote her. Birthday cards and notes and little gestures. She was such a sentimental person even if it bothered her that she was. But why hadn’t I saved the same from her? The little notes she would leave in my luggage or at my desk?

Then I found them. High atop my closet shelf, next to her beanie babies I need to figure out what to do with. Some cards, and two love notes.

“Love always,” she wrote.

“I❤️U”

And I cried, and sobbed, and shook.

I shouldn’t need proof, but I have it, written in her own hand, whenever I need to be reminded I was loved.

Apologies, just need to vent, I know this is normal and ill get around it. Share your stories or sympathy if it helps.

My wife’s funeral was this week. It was beautiful, truly healing and cathartic. So many told me I had honored her memory in the perfect way. I may one day get the strength to watch the recording as it was all a blur. I cried so hard. Amazing Grace was always hard, it will be even harder for the rest of my life.

Afterwards we had a lunch for guests, it too was lovely, so many people from many walks of our shared life meeting, sometimes for the first time. So much love and support for me.

My college friends invited me out afterwards. I am moving back to be near family and these friends invited the coming months, that was always the plan, even before she passed. At first I was hesitant, but decided I needed friendship time without family for a minute and went. I’m glad I did. It was healing in a different way to catch up.

But damn it. A friend I once crushed on hard started asking the collected friends about needing a new boyfriend, that she had had it with shitty guys and hadn’t had more than a few weeks of a relationship in the last three years. She started listing criteria, tall (check), employed ( check), handsome ( her call, not mine) and emotionally available ( once upon a time I suppose, I’m just emotionally raw now)

And thankfully my brain stopped my libido from blurting out “ I’m right here, can you give me a year?”

But that moment has filled my mind. I replay it. The guilt, the desire, the grief all wrapped up, exploding in the vacuum of physical intimacy.

I just want to be held again. Not like she did, no one ever could. But I want to be loved in that way more than I want oxygen.

I’m going to go cry in the shower.