We were married twenty-seven years. She used to tease me for being stubborn, for refusing to throw away a bolt or a screw because “it might be useful someday.” She said my garage looked like a museum of broken things waiting to be loved again.
Then she got sick.
And suddenly nothing could be fixed.
Six months. That’s all cancer gave us. Six brutal months of appointments, scans, bright hospital lights, and the smell of antiseptic clinging to my clothes like a second skin. I held her hand through the worst of it. I learned how to read her face like a map—where the pain was hiding, where the fear lived, where her strength kept slipping through my fingers no matter how tightly I tried to hold on.
The day she died, the world didn’t stop.
That was the cruelest part.
Cars still drove by. Neighbors still argued about lawns. Mail still arrived like it had no idea my entire universe had collapsed.
For weeks after the funeral, I drifted around our house like a ghost haunting his own life. The rooms were full of her, but she wasn’t there. The silence got louder every day.
And late at night, when the grief turned sharp and restless, I’d sometimes find myself staring at my service pistol in the nightstand. Not because I wanted to die.
Because I wanted the ache to stop.
