He lasted fourteen months.
People say things like, “At least you had time to prepare.” I’ve always wondered what they think that looks like when you’re losing someone you’ve spent forty years with.
There is no preparation.
There’s logistics. Medication. Church casseroles. Doctor visits. Quiet denial that looks like strength from the outside.
There are nights when you wake at two in the morning because their breathing sounds different—and you know, before your mind catches up, that something has changed forever.
After he died, I made him a promise.
Not one spoken at a funeral. No audience. No performance.
Just me, alone in bed, my hand resting in the empty space where he used to be, whispering into the dark because I didn’t know where else to put the words that still belonged to him.
I told him I would build the lake house.
We had talked about it for years—not as a dream, but as something real. Every time we drove past Lake Oconee, he would slow down just enough to look through the trees at the water and say,
