I placed the box on the security conveyor belt, then hefted my bulging backpack into a bin and pushed it into the scanner. When the screener, a young woman about my daughter’s age, noticed me, I patted the box.
“It’s cremains.”
“Thank you for telling us,” she said, “so we can be sure to treat it with the utmost respect.”
After a careful inspection, she handed the box to me. “I’m sorry for your loss,” she said, her tone making clear she meant it. “Thanks,” I said, nodding, and then headed toward the gate for my flight to meet my now-grown kids.
My husband, Kai, died seven years earlier. His diagnosis had come too late for any meaningful medical action, and the cancer killed him in just five months.
He had been active and in excellent health. The kids were close to college graduation, and we’d had so many plans for our empty-nest stage: international travel, beach sunrises, books to read and write. Maybe spoiling grandchildren someday.
The future we’d planned for and dreamed about was like pages ripped out of a book and burned, never to be read.
The shock of his death was overwhelming. A burial and a memorial service were totally out of the question. The grief was somehow too immense — too personal — to share.
In the “before” time, I was hypervigilant and super organized. I jokingly referred to myself as a type A-plus.
When Kai died, I lost my capacity to hold a thought — my ability to focus. I left my keys in the door lock and put laundry away in the refrigerator.
I have no real memory of the months after his passing. Each day felt like a restless sleepwalk. I’d “wake” to find myself at the grocery store holding a box of his favorite cereal with no idea how I got there and no awareness of how long I had been blankly staring at it.
I was a stranger to myself. One moment I’d be totally numb, and the next I’d silently rage against a guy across the street who had the audacity to be alive, minding his own business.
Worst of all was the silence. Not just the quiet house, but the oppressive absence of our shared life. No more text messages pinging back and forth, the “I love yous,” funny memes, frustrating work moments to share. No more sweet notes tucked into purses or wallets, underneath car keys, stuck to the bathroom mirror.
We’d done most everything together, rarely spending more than a night apart.
And suddenly, our ongoing conversation, our life together, was just … over. Full stop. I was his widow, not his wife. In an instant, the world I knew became utterly foreign.
It’s basic brain physiology that our habits — repeated actions, thoughts, routines — literally carve grooves into our brains.
That’s why our couple language shorthand and inside jokes worked, through many years of repetition and deep knowledge of a shared life.
With my life partner unceremoniously ripped from my life, my brain, in a very real sense, had no idea what to do. It had to stop and start constantly, learn to forge new pathways from point A to point B — pathways that did not include Kai — over and over. I had to try to carve a groove that matched my new reality.
Even though years have gone by, I still pick up my phone to text him before my brain remembers. The shock of it comes again, new and fresh, like it just happened.
I experience these moments either like the pop of a firecracker or hitting a brick wall.
For so long, it was difficult to think of anything else. The sheer sadness of my grief was bottomless.
