Can’t sleep again.
It’s now been 17 days and 11 hours since my husband died before my eyes in our bathroom after deteriorating over 10 days from what was diagnosed as the flu while our young son and I looked on, powerless to help. He wouldn’t believe me when I tried to convince him it was serious. He told me not to panic when I pleaded with him that I thought he was dying.
Two close friends have come to help me function and since gone. Two others helped me plan a memorial that unfortunately left me feeling much worse, after I forgot the statement I had prepared to read to him and an estranged friend of his drunkenly draped himself over me at the reception, crying then insulting both my husband and myself for so long I barely was able to talk to people who were there to actually support me. His ex wife has started to toy with me now that he is no longer available, attempting to trick me into giving her ashes and hinting at how she will make contact with my child’s half siblings impossible if she feels like it. My estranged dad has come, and we have only fought for one of the two days he’s been here.
Tonight I went through his mementos, artwork, photos, letters searching for…something though I don’t know what. I stayed up past 3, unable to give up. Then I laid down, but couldn’t stop myself from pouring over both our phones, searching again for something, to fill this vast void in me I suppose? The only thing I found that I hadn’t already examined ad nauseam was a log I’d kept on my phone of all the hateful, cruel, aggressive things he’d said to me in the last year or two; I’d begun doing this because he’d threatened to divorce me and take our child away from me.
Whatever I was searching for, this wasn’t it. My husband was a generous, loving, exuberant man who allowed me to live my life completely. We had so much fun together. But he was also this man who calculated how most effectively to hurt me and said the most painful things I’ve ever heard, sometimes for no discernible reason. Why can’t it be more simple? Why must it be so exhausting? And if I’m so exhausted, why can’t I sleep?