Michigan fall sunset view from my back porch.

I thought I would break.

We’d just begun a new chapter of being just the two of us again, children grown, new challenges and opportunities… after 34 years together, like young newlyweds, the world would be our oyster again hiding the pearl we knew would glimmer and shine its lustrous colors upon us. I’d rushed back from an overseas trip only to find myself now in charge of your healthcare.

And then you were gone.

So abrupt, from diagnosis to death in less than three months.

Crushed, angry, resentful for you having left me right when the adventures were getting even more interesting than the 30+ years before!

I restarted my studies, knowing that if I just immersed myself in the work I could hide away from my grief, ignore the wound in my heart. But by Christmas, I sat crying on the side of the bed…

I just. want. a hug.

I’d tried a dance class, a restorative process where I could lose myself in the movements, and connect to my grandmother, a dancer in her own day. You never wanted to dance with me… though there was that one last time. But still, the movements and the music began to heal me.

I don’t bite except on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

The dreams were so vivid that I looked forward to your visits. But the loneliness wouldn’t go away. Perhaps, if only there was someone, not one of our children, or friends, or anyone who knew you. Someone I could talk to who didn’t have your ghost to guide the conversations.

And then he reached out and I ignored him. Each week he’d check in. “I don’t bite except on Tuesdays and Thursdays,” he wrote. And I finally couldn’t stifle the laugh. The nerve, I thought. So we wrote to each other, first just a couple of times a week, then every day, and then we’d talk all night.

“I wish I could dance with you, ya know,” he wrote offering to join me in a dance class when he visited. It became our connection. He was awful at it, and I loved him for it anyway.

As we shared our stories with each other I realized it wasn’t just my tears that were falling for the one I’d lost. He cried for it, too, a life of wonder and adventure that he hoped to build with me.

And then… we did.

The above prose was written as part of a 13-minute writing exercise during a six-week workshop offered by @LauraLentzWriter and her Literati Academy. The writers participating in this series are exploring their way through grief and the hero’s journey.