January 21, 2018
Today's prompt was a photo and the idea of what in your new world would you want to show the loved one you lost.
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The photo in the prompt shows a landscape obscured by snow. Hard edges and landmarks are smoothed over. Any paths that exist are hidden beneath the white expanse. Whatever was familiar is now disguised. "Both literally and figuratively, the one who has died would not recognize this place where you live now."
But snow melts, and the old landscape emerges. My new world, though, is not going to change back. And it's not a place I would want to show Rader around. He didn't know my new world would orbit around a black hole, requiring constant vigilance to keep from spinning into. He couldn't have foreseen the oppressive fog that descends upon me at, of all places, the grocery store, where I no longer stock my cart with Goldfish and gala apples and Nilla Wafers and bananas that are still a little bit green because he doesn't like them too ripe. He wasn't aware that in his absence I would struggle to sleep, to eat, to work out, to read, to focus, to cook, to shower, to get dressed, to leave the house, and to be what I needed for my husband, my surviving child, and my mother.
I wouldn't want to show him the worst, because I would never want him to feel guilty, or to think that I felt by dying, he meant to hurt me. And I wouldn't want to show him the best, because I wouldn't want him to falsely conclude I was getting along OK without him. I don't want him to know that the black hole, the new center of my universe, looms threateningly, that it's there all the time, and that if I manage to put it out of my mind for a moment, it surges back sickeningly, like the lurch of an elevator, or a near-miss on the highway.
There are things he would have loved, in my new world. There was a total solar eclipse, right on our front lawn. It was beautiful and spectacular and breathtaking, literally cosmic. Mattie and I gasped in wonder and held hands and wandered around in amazement as it came and went. And felt the ache of his absence because we so wanted him to share it with us. But it was 10 weeks too late. Ten short weeks in all of time. In cosmic terms, he missed it by a microsecond.
I think he would have enjoyed Thanksgiving at Folly Beach, although I don't know if we would have gone, would have so clearly needed the change of venue, if he were still here. I know he would have liked to see our lake frozen over at the cabin this winter. I am sure he would have listened with me to Paula Poundstone's new podcast, spun off from Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, our Monday morning drive-to-school standby.
I feel the burden of having to experience these things on his behalf now, to appreciate them for two. Like when I was pregnant, only the world I'm in now is the horrible bookend to that exciting anticipation of a new life. There was a before Rader. There was all that was Rader. And now there's an after Rader, with a black hole in the middle, and no end. No, this is no place I'd want him to see.