Sometimes death convolutes reality.
The hero gets lost in the husband.
The pedestal gets too high to clean.
Life seems ideal.
Day to day, stress, need to support my spouse, pressure, love, anxiety of when I'll have to leave/be alone next.
Except.
I didn't get the option to choose life without him.
I just had to learn how to deal with the aftermath.
We were real people.
We had real lives and real fights.
There was real forgiveness and acceptance.
I hold on to everything in our relationship together because it brought me here.
Good, bad, nasty, ugly, raw truth thrown in your face at 2am during a deployment and the next morning is full of apologies.
Or silence.
Then panic because you don't know if the last thing you told your husband was something you'd regret for the rest of your life.
Then relief.
And then the day comes where the last thing you said to him was
"I love you."
Because you did.
Silence.
Those moments you share when you are your most vulnerable.
Those moments you cherish the most when they are gone.
Those moments you want to try and relive but you know it is only possible with someone else because your husband is dead.
Harsh.
It is the most devastating reality to face.
Reopening that wound and allowing someone else to pour themselves in.
It provokes you.
It terrifies you.
You know you're strong enough on your own.
You know how it feels when a heart breaks.
Yet you still want to feel that way again.
It is courageous.
It's painful to admit because even though my head knows Christopher is dead, my heart does not.
It will always be that way.
I will always share my heart with him.
Asking someone to accept that truth, finding someone who would dare to love someone as "damaged" as I am.
It's like winning the lottery.
Twice.
It is okay to want to feel that way again, even if it's not with the one you originally chose to spend your life with.
Stones can be thrown and judgments may be cast, but you can't break what has already been broken.
This is a beautiful mess.
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