Nearly Three Years and I Cannot Breathe
There are days when I don’t want to die or disappear. I just want, for a few hours, to stop missing someone. We are coming up on three years since I last heard my person’s voice. Three years since I held his hand, hugged him, kissed him. Three years since Keith was physically here with us.
Even writing that takes my breath away.
Three years sounds like such a long time. Somehow, it also feels impossibly short. I still remember his voice. I still know exactly what it felt like to hold his hand. And yet there is this growing stretch of time between the life we had together and the life I am living now. Sometimes that passage of time is devastating all by itself.
Liam doesn’t talk about his dad very often. But in the quiet moments, I know he thinks about him. The other day I asked him if, someday, he planned to tell his own children about their grandpa in heaven.
“Yes!” he answered immediately.
There wasn’t even a second of hesitation. He didn’t want to talk about it beyond that, and I respected that. But that little answer stayed with me. Keith is still part of Liam’s story. Someday, he will be part of another generation’s story too.
My own journey with grief has mostly been a very quiet, internal struggle. I write about it here. I talk about it some in therapy. But most of the time, grief lives inside my head—swirling, aching, occasionally feeling like it might explode out of me.
I never knew being separated from your person—your soulmate—could hurt this much.
I don’t always know how to articulate what grief feels like. Sometimes it is simply a heavy weight of profound sadness. Other times it overwhelms my entire system. It takes my breath away. It makes everything feel exhausting. It can make me wonder what the point of all of this is when the person I wanted to share my life with is no longer physically beside me.
And I don’t only miss Keith.
I miss who I was with Keith.
There is something strange about being called “single” when, in my heart, my love hasn’t changed. The relationship didn’t end because we stopped loving each other. There was no breakup. There was no decision to go separate ways.
He died. I am still here.
And somehow I have had to learn how to live as one person when, for so long, I understood my life as part of a pair. I’m not searching for some missing piece of myself. I can stand on my own. I do stand on my own, every day.
But I still miss my better half.
I hate this anniversary.
I would much rather celebrate birthdays, wedding anniversaries, vacations, ordinary Tuesdays—anything other than marking another year since we were forced apart.
But anniversaries will keep coming for as long as I am here.
Maybe that is what hurts so much about the buildup. Logically, I know a date is just a date. October 15 is twenty-four hours like any other day. But my heart doesn’t experience it that way. Every anniversary marks another year I have lived without hearing his voice, holding his hand, hugging him, or kissing him. And sometimes the amount of time that has passed since we parted is almost as painful as the parting itself.
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