What the Widowed Think About When They Talk About Love

I’ve been trying to write about love to connect it with the romance of the winter season. February is known as a month of love and winter cuddles and all that sweet stuff. But I always draw a blank and never really know where my hand will take the pen, or which keys my fingers will type. It’s difficult to write about love when you haven’t felt it in a long time. When you’re at a point where you don’t even understand how two grown adults slept comfortably in a queen-sized bed, because now there’s only room for one. There’s a hollow ache where that sort of love used to reside and it’s so heavy that digging down to where it rests is exhausting. Yes, we are loved by our friends and family. But we all know that’s a different kind of love. It’s not a late night love. It’s not a ‘I am so mad at you right now, I can’t believe this shit, but all I want to do is lay down with you and rest my head on your chest‘ type of love. That love is gone. Yet the month is coming to a close, so I’m attempting to write about it again.

I keep thinking of the title from Raymond Carver, “What We Talk about When We Talk about Love.” In that short story, he introduces us to four friends who are sitting around a table, drinking gin, and talking about love; but that isn’t the story my mind escapes to when I think of it. I think of the scene in “Cathedral,” where the blind man is tracing his fingers on a woman’s face. Different stories, but I group them together. And “Cathedral” isn’t necessarily a story Carver wrote about love, but the tracing of a face is where my mind escapes. And I think that’s just it. The physical touch. The way a touch feels when you love someone as opposed to when you don’t. There’s a certain magnetism you don’t get with everyone.

While I can still hear his laugh and see his smile when I want to, it takes a lot to let my mind feel his touch. When I look at pictures of my sons laying on his chest, I want to reach my hand out and touch him. I remember tracing my fingers along his face and over his chest when he was in the hospital bed and then again in his casket. And it was in that moment, in that room filled with flowers, when my tears dropped on his shirt, where I realized why people actually kiss dead bodies at funerals. An odd thing to say, though I never understood it before. But that was the last time my hand would ever touch him. And his warm body was cold. And it was then I realized it was the best choice for my kids not to see his body. They knew he was in his casket and they touched his casket, but they don’t know what he looked like inside. They don’t know how he felt. So they will always have the memory of him being warm and safe. They’ll always remember how you’d wake up sweating if you slept next to him. They’ll never know the feeling of his ice cold chest. They’ll never know the way his lips felt freezing cold. I remember almost asking for a blanket, but stopping myself because it didn’t matter. He wasn’t really there. It was simply his body. In my belief, he was with me as I planned everything for his final goodbye. I felt his presence over me as I turned in his obituary and picked his urn and planned the logistics of his services. And he knew I was hurting in so many ways, but he also knew I understood this wasn’t about me. This was a weekend where we celebrate all the good that took place in his life between birth and death. It wasn’t just about our marriage and it wasn’t just about his childhood. It wasn’t about my feelings. It was about the entire making of this man we all loved, a sorrowful celebration.

Thinking back to his touch, I realized when I talk about love I speak of a shadow. A memory. I see my husband sitting at the dinner table. I see how his body moves when he laughs. On the best days, I can actually hear his voice and hear his laugh. I can see him building a snowman with our boys. And I can see and hear him brushing his teeth. Those moments. The desire for late night gossip you can only share with your spouse. The glimpse of our life. The glimpse of what we had in those moments. That was my love. And then the images disappear. They have to disappear, so I can see who and what is right in front of me: The love notes from our children and laughter coming from their room and the beauty of the sun hitting our green grass.

He gave me the only breathing parts of him that will live on. And he always trusted me to raise them however I see fit. And when I talk to them about their dad, we talk about love. They ask about our wedding, the day they were born, the first time we kissed, when we first met. And so now when I think about what it is we talk about when we talk about love, I shift from the flirty splashes in the lake and the passion and the ‘I don’t care who’s watching’ kind of love to the faces of my children. Because they were created from that. Because they have always been given love since before they were born and they are gracious about sending that back into the world. I’ll always remember their faces as they stood at their father’s funeral, lips quivering and tears falling; how brave and strong they were in that moment. And I’ll always know they stood there because of love. Because of the love they were given from the man that lay before them and the love they received since before they took their first breath. It was pure. And when I see them standing there, I also see the four of us bunched together on a bed watching a movie about superheroes.

So, yeah, it’s difficult to talk about love without the heaviness of loss pushing in. But we try. We try to keep the memories of laughter and love close. We romanticize our marriages and look at weddings a bit differently, but we try. It’s difficult to hear joyful news without feeling a pang of heartache. And so we silently smile, or we keep our well wishes short. It’s a genuine smile. We are happy for your feelings of love and joy. But we need to shift before the loud absence of our love sets back in and all that comes from our mouth is a whole lot of loss. Before we start wondering what we’re really talking about, what we’re really thinking about, who we’re really imagining, and what we’re truly believing when we sit around and talk about love.