Fresh Widows

As Mary and I write this blog for our friends who are newly widowed, the memories rush over us once again. Not raw and shocking as they once were, but vivid nevertheless. And loneliness as a reality is one of the first to be felt and one of the most lasting. Perhaps so few people write about loneliness because the misery is just more than language can capture. I think loneliness comes as a surprise because most of us spent hours, days, sometimes even weeks from time to time on our own and got along just fine when the other person was working, traveling, who knows what. Maybe we even welcomed those quiet times to watch our own TV, to eat the peanut butter out of the jar, to drink from the milk bottle, to stay up until two with a great book,  to go out of the room without someone asking, Where are you off to? 

So the surprise for the newly widowed is that silence is so heavy and so deafening? Especially when you come home from a trip or a great day or even a bad day, and there is no one to say, "How'd it go?"