He died yesterday.

  1. My husband is a solitary man, he keeps to himself and only a select few have ever been 'let in' to his life.

    He often feels forced to interact with family because they share a bond of blood, mainly kept in touch by the occasional holiday interaction. He stresses deeply over these times, and sometimes I confess I leave them to him alone because I think he should have alone time with his family. When I am with him, he often relies on me to provide the bulk of the conversation.

    His main issue is that his relatives will say to him 'why haven't you called?', 'why haven't you visited?' yet they make no attempt to do either themselves.

    Two anomalies in this equation though are his Dad, and his Uncle David and it was with great sorrow we learned his uncle had passed at 4:30 p.m. yesterday. He leaves behind one son, a wonderful woman he had started a new life with, his brothers and my husband.

    I feel such a sense of sorrow for my husband, because the small group he's allowed into his inner circle has diminished by one.

    He came to me yesterday and says, 'you must think me a horrible person, the past three times I've cried, twice it's been over a cat'. Yet, I understand my husband in a way I think most wives who love and care about their husbands do. That he grieves in his own way, and it is a quiet fortitude that is shown in just carrying on.

    It's shown in the way his voice catches when speaking after he found out, its behind the snarky comments at the children, the short tempered moments between us.

    Yesterday as I was doing my regular bible reading, I came across a portion of the Sermon on the Mount and I paused for a moment at Matthew 5:4 and I thought of him with a great sadness.

    'Happy are those who mourn, since they will be comforted.
    '

    I told him that I wished the comfort that my thoughts on the resurrection provided would comfort him too but acknowledged they would not mean the same thing to him. I gave him a hug, and he retreated to the basement alone to work on his n-scale model train set.

    Then, as softly as a thought formulates, a small nudge told me that I needed to go sit in an easy chair in the basement and just 'be' with him, and so its what I did.
    GrahamLewis and 8Bit Bob like this.

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