Then one of them leans forward, caws raucously, once, and takes wing. It shits on the minister’s shoulder, and for some reason this just strikes me as almost unbearable funny. I have to bite my tongue until I taste blood to keep from snickering at my own husband’s funeral.

This isn’t grief, or sadness, or mourning. This is a void. Emotional emptiness. All of my sadness has been burned through, all my grief used up. There is no more panic. No more desperation. I feel nothing, and I wallow in it like a sow in muck.

It will break, and soon. I know this. I can feel it coming, the tide of sorrow. I feel like someone standing on a beach, watching the water recede, leaving fish flapping and crabs snapping and fronds of seaweed laying limp…watching this means a tsunami is coming.

If you see the waters recede, then it’s usually already too late to run.

So it is with me. There is no stopping what’s coming.

But it’s not here yet.

He’s been dead three days. I have no clue what happened after he breathed his last breath. It’s not even a blur. It’s nothing. Vacant. A bare dirt patch in the landscape of memory.

I remember lying in our bed, feeling his warmth recede from the sheets.

I think Tess was there, maybe she spoke to me, maybe she simply sat next to me. I don’t know.

I haven’t wept. I wonder if I will.

7 days

A week.

I’m still numb.

But now the numbness is not a comfort, not a balm of nothingness, not a balloon of calm in a world of pain and chaos and grief.

Now, numbness is…a sickness. An inability to cope. To accept.

I recognize the stages of grief within me, I know where I am in the process. I’m stuck.

Grief is building inside me. To continue the tsunami metaphor, Adrian’s death is the earthquake far out at sea, a mile under the surface. Right now, the tsunami is racing toward the shore, maybe only a foot high, but moving with jet-plane speed, with monstrous energy.

At the funeral, my mind saw the waters pull back.

Now is the seconds or minutes before the freight train smashes into shore. I’m waiting for it.

I’m pregnant with a demon of grief and sorrow.

Grief, and Sorrow. In this, they deserve the title, the capital letters.

I cannot do anything.

I’ve barely slept since he died. I cannot eat. Tess has to force me to sip water.