As I was driving home, eastbound on a two-lane highway, I saw in the distance that a car was passing another car heading westbound on my highway. Then I saw a second car pass the slowpoke. Both passing cars had their headlights on. As I got closer, and I got closer in a hurry because the two headlit cars were seriously moving, I saw that the car in front was a white hearse with flags a-flapping. The car behind was a Toyota FJ Cruiser, bright yellow, also with flags a-flapping.

I believe I saw the least sedate funeral procession in the history of funerals, but thankfully it was also one of the shortest!

There have been a lot of things I could have said over the past month and change, but I’ve been mostly silent. There’s a fine line in front of me. I can see it. It lies between wallowing and standoffishness. I can’t afford either–the former because it will make me crazy, and the latter because I’ll die of loneliness if no one ever wants to hear from me again.

In short, I don’t want to have grief cooties. I don’t want people to avoid me because I talk of nothing but how inflexible my diaphragm is now, how hard it is to breathe, how much even the air hurts me.

At the same time, I’m doing better than I expected. I’m walking and talking and going to Kroger like a normal person. I’m buying bagged salad and eating potato chips instead. I’m American as hell.

I didn’t have a funeral for Steve. He didn’t want one, which is great because I hate them. But there’s a downside: When I encounter people I know a bit but not well, I don’t know what they know. I need to go to the pharmacy where he and I spent thousands of dollars a month over the last few years, but I’ll feel so conspicuous walking through that doorway.

How many times I’ve said, “I don’t know if you’ve heard…” My husband died. My husband died. I can almost type it without feeling that burn in my nose. Almost. But saying it aloud, oh you can hear the wobble.

I’m doing okay. That’s my answer to every how are you or how are you doing or how are you coping or how have you been. I’m doing okay. I say it and each time I sound surprised, as if I’m just discovering that yes, I’m doing okay.

It’s as if they’re asking me how many fingers I have, and each time I say, in shock, “I have ten!” After a while, you’d think I would stop being amazed.

I didn’t lose a storybook dream life. Maybe that’s why I can be doing okay now. Life already had its ups and downs, so even this crushing down isn’t that unusual. That’s what I’ll tell myself, anyway.

I’m doing… okay? I’m doing okay. There is less to fear now. I’m doing okay.

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They tell me he is dead. I say I know.
My skin is frozen to the porch rail.
My heart is in the kitchen not beating.
He died silently beside the oven.

The paramedics slip on the porch stoop.
My fingertips stay behind in the ice.
I have too many arms and can’t arrange them.
My knees buckle though I said they wouldn’t.

I can see the words before I hear them.
It is cold and cold, and only cold.
Someone’s hand has me by the shoulder.
I say he is dead. They say they know.

Twelve years ago today, when I was 25, I sacrificed normal to love. I didn’t really understand what I was doing, but I did it. Relatives and friends thought I was insane to fall in love with and marry someone who was going to be so damned precarious.

God, yes, it was insane, and fueled by this monster of pride that made me think that I was somehow more noble, more caring, stronger, tougher than the rest of them. I would show them! Oh, I would show them.

And I did.

It warped me. My usual became death, waiting for it, fighting it off, thinking about it all the damned time. I became a person consumed by fear, a person clawing and desperate to hold on to pain if it just meant we were both alive. (I wrote in a poem about how the painful smell of a skunk says “I’m alive! I’m alive!”) Fear means there’s something to be afraid for, something to lose.

We didn’t have a normal. I never got to have the same dreams other people had, of old age in my husband’s arms, of travel or adventure, or even just home improvement projects or him carrying in all of the groceries. I didn’t get that, and I resented it. I hated him at times for taking that from me, for being the court jester instead of the knight. And I hated myself going with my gut instead of my brain.

We were happy, most of the time. Twisted and resentful and broken and missing out, but happy. Or at least contented, though I would never have been contented if I knew how much this would hurt.

But never normal. I don’t even know what normal looks like, what it feels like. I’m bent double under a weight that no longer exists. I don’t know how to straighten my back.