Seventeen months ago today, I lost the other half of my soul.

I took flowers to her grave today. I took a second bouquet for her mother for Mother’s Day. While I was there, I ran into her cousin who sold us the headstone for the plot Jane shares with her mother. He remembered me, though I was so lost in my own thoughts it took some time for his name to come back to me.

Today was bad. Tears were never far away. I had meetings to prepare for and a dozen other projects I needed to work on. I am writing this just before 11 p.m. The will to work on stuff just never arrived. The day vanished into grief and attempts to escape from grief. I feel broken and old again tonight.

There is nothing pretty about loss. Movies and TV and plays make it seem easy the way they make recovery from major surgery a two or three-day affair. Some people subscribe to this myth that, magically, it all gets better after a year. For some, I suppose it does. That has not been the case for me. It has not been the case for a lot of the people I meet in grief groups.

I wrote yesterday about mortality–that we all die eventually. Eventually, about half of you reading this will experience what I am experiencing now. The one you love will die, and you will be the one left behind to deal with all the unfinished business and the grief. The emptiness on the other side of the bed, while it is a good image and decent metaphor, does not even come close to the reality. But it is as close as I have found to take you to the emotional state this is.

This will sound like a broken record. I have said this before, but it bears repeating: take care of your self. Go to the doctor for that physical every year and don’t hesitate about going in between if something does not seem right to you. Get the recommended tests at the recommended intervals. Make sure your significant other does likewise.

Tell the people you love that you love them–but more than that, show them that you love them: hold hands in public. Buy them flowers for no better reason than that it seems like a good day for that. Shower each other with love in every way you can think of–and then invent some new ones. Leave nothing that needs saying left unsaid at the end of the day.

Thirty-six months ago, the school year was winding down for us. Retirement was close enough we could smell it. Twenty-four months ago, Jane’s feet were getting swollen at the end of the day, but it didn’t seem like a big deal. Seven months later, she was gone.

Now, I try to organize fundraisers for the disease that killed her. I walk long walks with strange shirts on my back. And I stand at her grave on the tenth of every month trying to figure out what happened and why. The answers are all unsatisfactory.

I love her that much–and I miss her that much.