Kindness. What would kindness mean? What would kindness look like? Perhaps the question I need to start with is: what DOES kindness mean Because I knew kindness. And I saw kindness. I saw it the night Suse and I met. She talked to me. More than that, she listened to me. That was a kindness. …
Friday July 6, 2018. 12:36am. Royal North Shore Hospital, Sydney. I was only one second a widower when I met her. The emergency doctor had just finished telling me there was nothing more they could do. Suse lay motionless on the table. Dead. Her beautiful heart arrested. I refuse to say failed. Her heart never …
Perfume on your pillow. That’s become my guilty pleasure now. My little foray into fantasy every night. I use it like some sort of magical elixir, hoping somehow to trick my mind into dreaming of you. I like to think of it as a way of breathing you in. It hasn’t worked yet. I don’t …
Here’s how I live in the desert. I begin each day by reaching out to the barren bed beside me. She’s still not there. But the perfume I sprayed on her pillow last night lingers. And the desert wind blows memories of her back to me which I nostalgically breathe in. But memories are like …
Love can be profoundly inexplicable. There are many things I could tell you about who Susie was, and what I admired about her. There are many things I could tell you about our relationship, what made it uniquely special, what gave it its fingerprint. But I could never express adequately the true depth of what …
It’s true. I’m not the person I used to be. I’m just not. We met when we were 19, and were inseparable from the start. For 22 years we wove ourselves into each other. Intertwined. Enmeshed. Our whole adult lives were built in reference to one other. Decisions made, together. Children raised, together. Journeys traveled, …
“It’s 9 o’clock on a Saturday…” However you feel about the song, Billy Joel’s Piano Man portrays a sobering vignette of human life which is the reality for so many. The dingy, mid-evening setting provides a perfect metaphor for describing the unique emptiness of loneliness. The desire to “forget about life for a while” amplifies …
Carly, my sister, drove me home from the hospital at about 4:00am. Her presence through that ordeal was an unbelievable comfort to me. Something I’ll never forget, and hopefully something I’ll never have to do in return. Carly had a special relationship with Susie. She saw her as the older sister she never had. She’d …
Today marks four months since Susie died. Four months. The monthly milestones don’t really mean that much in themselves – it is just another day after all – but they always seem to throw up a reason to reflect all the more. Today, I’ve been thinking a lot about the curiosity of time in grief. …
A friend asked me today “What has been the hardest adjustment following Susie’s death?” I appreciated the question for a number of reasons. First, it showed a willingness to walk in the darkness with me for a few moments, a willingness to understand at a deeper level what our experience has been like. But, secondly, …