Sunday, Feb. 21

I’ve cried twice today already, and it is only noon. I haven’t talked to you much yet. Yesterday I couldn’t bear the crying, and I was driving, crying hard, so I changed the crying to talking, and that also helped. “So I’m crying,” I cried, “please help me. I need help and I don’t want you to be gone. Don’t. Be. GONE” and that helped the crying a little. I heard my mind make your voice up in my head and the voice told me that I needed to drive. You were calm and clear, like you really could be, and you were a very good driver. I appreciated it. I swallowed, made the turn, and started nodding back to you, that yes, I could drive, I could do it. I could. Damn it all to hell, I could.

I talked to you another time yesterday. I talked to you running around the lake, under the pink sunset and before the reeds where we saw the swans. I said that I hoped you were okay. To say it out loud, to speak to you, meant I talked past all my doubts and certainties about death. But I don’t really have a choice. I have no idea what I think about death. The afterlife. Any of it, but it’s here now forming my life. You knew what you thought about death. You were, are, a Catholic in your soul. So I give it up to that. It’s your death, and I’ll be there for it. I’ll talk to your spirit, and my wandering humanist soul will be the better for it. Fine.

So I’ve been talking to you. When I called out yesterday, it was just in my mind. I was running around the lake, and what came to my mind was that I hoped that you were okay. I want that for you. I don’t want pain and confusion and more of what killed you here. I want something more. Then my mind or my conscience or some part of my something told me that you were probably still struggling, that you probably still had things to do. You were concerned for us, for how we would handle your loss. You’d want to span us all, all of those who cared, and it would be hard. You might not be unable to be with me all the time. You’re also handling your kids. I swallowed and choked and said I was all right. I nodded. I said I was strong and I would be okay.

Michael John Beaulieu, I was right and I was wrong. I am strong, more so because I had you. I miss you with so much strength. And I will be okay, but I’m not there yet. Not nearly. I’ll need to have you around for a long time. As I write this my chest physically aches, so strongly, it just wells up in me, to make me feel such a sensation of you, and my overly intellectual abstract humanist self has no idea if I’m having any kind of thought about the after-life, because I am still so unwilling to know that you’re part of it, the after-life. Your forearms. I loved them. They slayed me. I cannot hear that they have no life, for they had so much for me.

Now I have cried a third time today.