I buried my husband six months ago. At least, that was what everyone told me I had done. I stood beside a casket under a gray Missouri sky while the wind pulled at my black coat and my son Lucas kept one hand pressed against my elbow, as if I might fold in half and disappear into the grass.
I heard the minister’s words, the soft distant scrape of shovels, and I placed a trembling palm on the polished wood of the coffin that supposedly held Thomas Whitaker, the man I had slept beside for forty-one years. The casket was closed. They told me it was kinder that way.
They said the accident had been severe, that my memories deserved to remain untouched, that I should keep Thomas as he was on Sunday mornings with coffee in his hand and the newspaper spread across his knees. So I believed them. Grief makes obedience feel like mercy.
It makes other people’s certainty easier to accept than your own screaming doubt. For six months I lived inside the shape of his absence. I woke before sunrise and still reached toward the right side of the bed, still expected to touch the warmth of his shoulder.
I cooked too much food, bought the mustard he liked, and folded laundry that no longer included his white undershirts with the stretched collars. His reading glasses stayed on the side table. His denim jacket hung by the back door.
A stack of marina supply receipts sat in the kitchen junk drawer, held together with a rubber band, because he had always said he would organize them this weekend. There is always a weekend promised by men who never intend to keep it. I went to the grocery store on a Wednesday because grief does not refill the refrigerator.
The store was busy in that quiet late-afternoon way, with retired couples comparing prices and mothers pushing carts with sleepy toddlers. An old country song played softly from the ceiling speakers, and I remember thinking how offensive it was that the world could look so normal. I turned into the canned goods aisle with a list in my hand.
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