When your spouse dies, there are many things you have to take care of: arranging for the funeral, dealing with a will or lack of one, canceling future doctor’s appointments, and so forth. When Adrian died, my daughter and sister helped me with the immediate tasks, and we did them methodically.
Once the urgent things are taken care of, you can put off the others for as long as you need to. But as you finally take care of each one, it feels like a fresh loss each time.
A few weeks after Adrian died, a friend reminded me that my voice mail message still said, “You have reached the home of Adrian and Lynne.”
As far as I was concerned, it was still his house. He just wasn’t living in it any more. And as I changed the message, I felt the loss.
If his actual voice had been recorded in that message, I don’t think I could have erased it ever.
Mail addressed to Adrian keeps coming. Some I throw into recycling. If it is persistent, I write “deceased” on the envelope and “return to sender,” and put it back in the mailbox. Each time, a fresh reminder.
My sister went with me to our bank the week she was here immediately after Adrian died. The bank cautioned me not to take Adrian’s name off our account too soon in order to make it easier to deposit any checks that might still come with only his name on them.
Last week—a year and a half after Adrian died—I went to the bank to have his name taken off the account. It was a simple procedure requiring only a copy of the death certificate. Yet I cried on the way home. Piece by piece, the traces of him are leaving my life.
In the first week after Adrian died, his sons took a lot of his belongings, which I urged them to do. That first week seemed the right time to clean out the closet and drawers, to box things up. Anything that didn’t get done then, didn’t get done.
After more than a year, I still lived in the house without changing anything, leaving his old office as it was. His sets of VCR tapes on physics were on the shelves, his computer on the desk, and photos of his four sons as children on the wall.
The day after Thanksgiving this year, my daughter and grandchildren helped move furniture for two hours as we rearranged the whole house and art studio. I am now using Adrian’s old office as my office. It has my desk in it, my computer, and my files.
I had tried many times this year to go through the huge stack of Adrian’s old family photographs, only to give up each time, unable to deal with the emotional distress. When I finally did manage it a few weeks ago, I was able to share many of the photos with his sons, and that was gratifying. I also set aside my favorites of Adrian for my own special collection.
In my new office, I left the photos of the four sons on the wall, but added many more family photos that I will enjoy looking at every day. One is a framed enlargement of my mother as a little girl sitting on her mother’s lap. This photograph had been in the closet for years.
I never had the time, inclination, or wall space to hang these photos before. Now I treasure them all.
I am still wearing my wedding ring, and plan to wear it until I die, but will I? I am already checking out men’s profiles on match.com.
But I am not looking for romance, just the best friend that I lost.
