Who is a widow? What is a widow? Who am I?

What do you do when you realize that your love has come and gone?  Others are just getting married and starting their lives together, and you are no longer wondering when you love will come along, but instead you realize that day has come and gone.  Learning to live with one you love isn’t something you can look forward to, it’s something that you can only look back on as a time you once had, but has passed.

Who are you now?  You can’t even worry about what lies ahead, because you don’t even know what lies in the here and now.

You are who now?  Certainly, you are not single, in the sense that you were single before you were married.  You still feel more like the married person you once were, but you are alone.

You are a widow, but what does that mean? What is it to be a widow?  When you sit around a table with friends single and married, divorced and . . . no, you are the only widow.  No one talks to you like a single, but they don’t want to talk as if your husband were still alive and you were a married.

How much longer will I be able to join into conversations with other marrieds about married life, before my comments become an irrelevant thing of the past?  I still talk about how “we” do things and what “we” went through, just like I did five months ago before he died.  Will I always be allowed to do that?  Is part of that not recognizing that things have changed?

But I don’t know how the new me should be. I don’t know what it is to be a widow.

I’ve kept a journal for 4 years.  Everyday it asks me a new question.  I have answers from before I met Shah, answers when we were engaged, married and then parents.  I don’t know how to write in it now.  I can’t believe that my life still goes on withing him.

I understand that the world keeps going but how do I go on?  Dreams have been shattered.  Half of me is gone.

Who am I now?  I am still me.