I haven’t written in about a month. Today marks 16 months since Sara’s passing. I kind of feel like marking the time since someone’s death is similar to marking the age of a baby/toddler – at some point you have to transition from months to years, but that line is fuzzy and people have different jumping off points. For now, I’m still in months.
Lately, my mind keeps drifting to the physicality of Sara that I miss so much. I can picture in my mind’s eye her physical self, but especially her hands and feet. Both her hands and her feet were chubby and her feet were flat (Flintstones feet, she called them). We liked to hold hands or touch each other often – in the car, on the couch next to each other, walking somewhere. We would play footsie sometimes. We liked to give each other massages. I close my eyes and it only takes a brief imagining of her the touch of her hand on my face, or vice versa, to send tears down my face. I have trouble explicitly remembering her hair before she lost it to chemo, and that bothers me. (She had such beautiful hair, that changed quite dramatically over the time we were together – from short & red to shoulder length & brown to other stages in between & after.)
It has now been 16 months since I physically touched Sara. I wish I specifically remembered our last hug from when she was still aware. It would’ve probably been on Halloween, Oct 31st, 2019 when I was arriving or leaving at some point that day. She was in and out of it, but after that day she really wasn’t consciously present.
On a random side note, apparently Oct 2019 was unusually cold & snowy here in Denver, with Denver staying below freezing for an unusually long stretch of > 100 consecutive hours in the last week of the month… but I really don’t remember anything about the weather that week. All I remember of that last week in October is in bits and pieces:
- Watching some cute birds flit about the windowsills of the hospital in the melting snow…
- Seeing the movie Hocus Pocus playing on repeat nearly every time we turned on the TV…
- Wearing one of Sara’s thick warm chunky grey cable knit button-up sweaters in place of a coat to the hospital (to which Sara asked if anyone commented on me wearing a woman’s sweater – no one had)…
- My constant concern over her emotional state, not knowing how to help…
- My feeling helpless over her worsening health and no apparent answers…
- The daily drives in the morning from the house to the hospital, then the hospital back to the house and back again (to let the dogs out at lunch), and then back home at night to sleep and do it all over again the next day. There were a few days were a friend or family member was able to take care of the dogs, and I was so grateful for having less driving those days.
So now, I’m here 16 months later, living alone through a pandemic, and still desperately missing her touch, her physical presence, her hugs. I miss her love. There’s something about the snowy weather that makes me feel particularly vulnerable to my grief, and I wonder if it’s that part of me that absorbed that unusually snowy October 2019, despite me not consciously being able to remember much of it now. We got a bunch of snow last week, and it’s still lingering in our yard & driveway.
I’m not sure the point of this post, but I just had to write tonight. I’m sitting here looking at our snoozing dogs cuddled up together, enjoying a glass of wine in the living room of the lovely home Sara and I made together, and just missing her, so much. Tonight, especially her touch.