Four

Four years.

What does that mean?  Am I supposed to feel a certain way, be at some new level of acceptance or understanding?  

I've been thinking about what four years means and I'm just a blank, because it's just a number.  And it doesn't change a damn thing.  I was reading back over what I wrote on the first year anniversary and the second.  I even looked at the one I wrote the third year but never published (because it still hurt too much).  I think I expected to see some kind of pattern, maybe a Kubler-Ross progression (shock, bargaining, acceptance).  What I saw was just me struggling to cope with the unthinkable, in all kinds of ways.

Now it's four years and how do I feel?  I still miss you so much I can't bear to put your artwork on the walls.    

There are still those piercing moments when I remember that you are gone...a quick intake of breath, stab of pain.  I watch the Long Island Medium on TV to convince myself that people don't disappear when they die, but hang around watching over us, hoping to break through for a little uplifting conversation.  In Huntington Lake I still feel your presence and talk to you, hoping to draw you down to earth for awhile.  And I still get up every morning at six and work a jigsaw puzzle, patiently putting pieces together to prove that there still is order in the universe, something broken can really be made whole again. 

But it isn't true, really.  You're gone.  Wherever you are, whether you slip between realities and visit us or not, you aren't here to call when a book is published, or your wife needs you, or  I'm so hysterical with laughter over some inane experience I'm having I just have to share it with you.

So here's the deal, Tom.  It doesn't look like things are going to change all that much whether it's been one year or four or twenty, I suspect.  Yes, it does get better.  I'm not crying everyday or withdrawing from everyone I know so I can be left alone to grieve.  But the missing you seems to be holding it's own. 

I can't imagine why I thought it wouldn't.