The Time We Were Given

I saw a quote recently that asked something I hadn’t really thought about in that exact way before.

"What if our loved one wasn’t meant to be our happy ever after? What if we were part of theirs?"

I don’t know that I would have liked that idea in the beginning. Early grief is too raw for thoughts that try to rearrange the meaning of things. Back then, I didn’t want a different angle, I just wanted him back. I wanted our life back. I wanted more time, more ordinary days, and more chances to be irritated by the very things I would later miss.

When someone dies, you mostly understand it from where it leaves you standing. I was the one still here, waking up in the house after everything had changed. I had my girls to raise, a life to figure out, and a future that had suddenly become something I didn’t recognize. Of course I thought about what I had lost.

I lost my husband. My daughter lost her dad. Our home lost the person who made it feel like the life we had built together. The plans we had made were just gone, and the ordinary things became strange overnight. For a long time, that was the only way I could see it: I had lost him.

Then that quote made me wonder whether there was another part of the story I hadn’t given much attention to. Maybe one of the things I gave Robert was a good life while he was here.

Not perfect; I’m not going to pretend we had some flawless, glowing marriage where everyone spoke gently and nobody ever got on anyone’s nerves. We were real people. We had normal stress, normal arguments, normal tired days, and all the normal marriage stuff. There were probably plenty of times when neither one of us was especially delightful.

Still, there was love there. There was a home. There was our daughter. There were inside jokes and routines and family habits. There were dinners and errands and bills and laundry and all the boring pieces of life that don’t seem precious until you’d give anything to have one more regular day.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what his life meant to me. What he gave me, what I lost when he died, and how his death changed me, shaped me, broke things in me, and eventually forced me to rebuild. That makes sense. Grief starts with the person left behind because that’s where the pain is loudest.

Robert wasn’t only someone I lost, though, he was someone who lived. He had years here. Not enough years - never enough - yet still years. He had people who loved him. He had a daughter who adored him. He had a wife who wanted a life with him, even on the messy and ordinary days when nobody was thinking about how fragile any of it was.

None of that makes his death feel better. I don’t think anything makes it better in that way. I’d still take more time in a second. Watching our daughter grow up, growing older together, listening to him complain about technology, all of it. Even the things that probably would have driven me crazy; maybe especially those.

Looking back now, I can see that while Robert was here, he was loved. He belonged to us, and we belonged to him. His life had warmth in it. He had family, a home to come back to, and people waiting for him, needing him, laughing with him, arguing with him, and counting on him.

Sometimes grief makes the whole story feel like it ended wrong, and from this side of it, it did. It feels wrong that he didn’t get more years. It feels wrong that his daughter had to grow up without him. It feels wrong that the future we thought we had just stopped.

The ending isn’t the whole story, though. The years before it still count. So does the love, the home, and the ordinary daily life, even the dull parts. Maybe especially the dull parts. There’s something comforting now in remembering that he wasn’t only a man who died young, he was a man who was loved while he lived.

I wasn’t only the person left grieving him. I was also one of the people who made his time here better. I was his wife. I made a home with him. I loved him. I gave him a daughter. I shared the ordinary middle of life with him, the part that doesn’t usually look important while it’s happening.

That thought doesn’t take away the ache. It doesn’t explain why he died when he did, and it doesn’t make me grateful for the loss. I’m not grateful for that - I never will be. Still, it does soften one small corner of it.

It lets me see our life together as something he had, not only something I lost.

For years, I think I carried the grief mostly as absence: all the things he missed, all the things we missed, and all the moments where his empty place was the loudest thing in the room. There were so many of those moments.

Seeing myself as part of his good, not just the one who survived his loss, changes the picture a little. His life mattered here. He was loved by his family, wanted in the ordinary everyday ways, and still carried by the people who remember him.

I wish he’d had more of it; I wish we all had. I wish the story had gone on for decades longer, with all the ordinary complaints and bills and holidays and noise that come with staying. At the same time, I don’t want to miss the fact that what he did have was real.

Maybe Robert wasn’t my ‘happily ever after’, at least not in the way I thought when I married him. Our life together was shorter than it should have been, and I’ll always hate that part. Still, I was part of the love he had while he was here.

For some reason, that thought gives my heart a little room to breathe today.

With Grace for the Mess,

~Stef