What He’ll Never Know

Shel’s been gone from this world for four and three-quarters months now, and I’m having a hard time of it. I’ll think I’m doing better, and then suddenly, the no-Shel reality slaps me in the face once again.

I woke up in the middle of one night so sick I almost called 911. What stopped me was the realization that I couldn’t even get upstairs to open the door for them and I’d hate to see it broken into. Shel wasn’t here. I’ve been CT-scanned, ultra-sounded, and now antibiotic-ed, physical therapy-ed, and am feeling somewhat better. Shel never knew about any of it, and he wasn’t here to help me get through it.

He also doesn’t know that Zazou has been gone for the same three weeks that I’ve been sick. I’m so glad that he doesn’t know, because she loved him the most, and he’d have been so sad to lose her.

He doesn’t know that I had an 80th birthday party for our friend Sheila, and that I baked her this gorgeous cake. The last time I made this treat was for Shel’s own birthday, his very last birthday cake. I don’t even want to think about what jokes he told at his very last Thanksgiving, what I gave him for his very last Christmas. I still haven’t emptied his closet – those things he wore are so dear to me now, they touched him, still look like him.

I’ve written three articles for publication this month, so it hasn’t been all fainting couches and Kleenex, but I’m feeling it so deeply these days. He’s gone, he’s not coming back, just like Beppo and Zazou. It’s the end of an era, an era I loved above all my other time on Earth.  He’ll never know what I do next, how I feel, what I’ll become. He’ll never know how I die, and I guess that’s a good thing. He’ll never see how our sons turn out, won’t see Eric marry, won’t see my hair go grey, if it ever does.

His life is actually over. That’s so hard to fathom. I’m not a wife. That’s even harder to grasp. Alone on the day-to-day sea, trying to stay afloat.

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Save The Bees Knees

Bees are in the news almost every day, all up in your face when it’s a slow news day in the Middle East or Ukraine, and today I even saw Toby get stung right in the kisser. There’s colony collapse disorder, arguments about whether or not neonicotinoid insecticides are involved, talk of mass starvation when pollinators disappear into the beepocalypse, and worse.

Yet my garden has hundreds of bees in it at any given moment. They love lavender, and salvia, and my garden is overflowing with both of them. I sometimes sit for an hour, watching the bees, who pay absolutely no attention to me, and thinking about how they might disappear from the Earth, and how we all do disappear, and similarly non-summery thoughts.

But one good thing I realize is that the bees love my garden, and they’re not dying here. And it’s something we all can do, plant a garden full of flowers that bees love, and do everything possible to provide their favorite habitat. It’s not the long-term solution, but for once in the scheme of impending world disasters there’s actually something we can do to help.

Plus, watching bees and smelling the lavender gives you something to do when you forgot to charge your phone.