My wife, the love of my life, died nine days ago. At 5:00am on August 3rd, my first kiss and my only love, took her last breath. I'm not sure what's next. How do you move on from the most important aspect of your life for the last 12 years? How does one learn to be single and adult for the first time at 31? Widower is an adjective for a 65 year old, not someone who still wears Chucks and listens to the Magnetic Fields. So... What the fuck is next?
Conventional wisdom says there are five stages of grief: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance. There are at least two falsities there. First, five emotions are woefully incomplete. In the last nine days have found me adding Overwhelmedness, Forgetfulness. Regression, Fear, Sexual Desire, Nostalgia, Alcoholism, Humility, and Impatience. I'm sure seven or eight more will show up in the next week. Secondly, stages imply distinct phases, each occurring at a certain interval, before moving on to the next. Any given point in time has contained two, if not three of the five stages. I bargain with my depression, I accept my anger, and I certainly deny that I should be depressed about my bargaining. In summary, all I've learned is that convention is bullshit.
I miss her. There's a vacancy throughout my soul, and the only one who can lead me through this is gone. Instead, all I have is the ether. My only option is to type this out until I can find a solution. We'll just have to go through the fourteen stages together. Thanks for coming along.
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