The first time I realized that grieving the love of my life would mean crying over the weirdest shit was when I was in the midst of planning his funeral. I had to get clothes together to bury him in and that meant, I would have to do a load of his laundry, so he had clean underwear.
This would be the last time I would be washing his underwear for him.
I was emotionally unraveled at that point. There was the active role I played in his death: finding him, trying to save him, the 911 call, the police, the paramedics and so on. Then, I had already had to deal with people I could go with never having to see again in my life, I had to write his obituary which was a day long saga filled with many tears and sobs trying to get it like I knew he would want it to be, and then came the drama of not having a plot to bury him in until hours before his funeral. I got myself through it all though.
It was the underwear though that sent me into sobs on our laundry room floor.
However, the next morning my daughter and I went to the funeral home and delivered an outfit I knew he would want along with clean underwear and socks. And on the day, he was buried, he looked very much like he did in life with everything I knew he would have wanted with him.
I have been doing alright since. Some days are so hard and other days it feels okay again. Christmas was really good, but the days that followed were very hard. Then, so much of the house decided to fall apart: the chimney, the fence, and our bathroom all decided in one way or the other to just fall apart.
Thankfully, I have been able to deal with most of it. Tomorrow begins what I am sure will be a saga with the bathroom. However, it was once again something weird like a bathroom that sent me into tears on the floor. So much of Phil’s health problems revolved around that bathroom. I would often be scared that it would be the bathroom that I would find him in. However, it was not in the end.
Oh did I cry though as I cleaned out our bathroom today because by tomorrow it will look nothing like our bathroom anymore. I should be thankful for that and I am, because it was the one room of our house I absolutely hated. It was beat up, painted over tile that renters went to town in. They even spray painted over the wallpaper that had been in there. It was just a terrible room that no matter how much I cleaned it, always felt dirty and old and the paint was just peeling off of every tile. I was able to go through his things, paint our bedroom and make space for myself…but this dumb bathroom was going to send me into sobs on the tile floor…
Because it is something else that is moving me on from the space I shared with my husband. Our married couple space will be completely different from the one that we shared.
Katherine Kuzma-Beck 