You try and kid yourself, you join a bereavement group, you volunteer at the local library, you distract yourself by putting extraneous posts on your blog, you try to get back out into the real world, but the reality is you don’t have a life, you don’t have the energy, the will, so you sit in the former “living room” and you dwell in the memory of your wife, whose photos are on the mantel, and you watch old movies, often with the sound turned down so you have the silence to live in her memory, her memory is a sanctorum and you are inside it and she is still alive, and you’re smoking again and of course you drink a lot, gin in the summer and rum in the winter and Jack Daniel’s whatever the season and you oh so smoothly slip into a tolerable haze, imbued at bedtime by Xanax which helps you sleep and you sleep until noon and your first thought on waking is, five hours to cocktail hour and the beginning of the haze, the sanctum, the illusion she is still alive.

Back to the front page