Free Saturday Night Widows by Becky Aikman

knew that I would miss Bernie, but what I didn’t know until those hyperconscious nights was that grieving would be so much more than any missing I’d experienced up to now. Missing, the way I looked at it, was what you felt for someone who didn’t happen to be around at the moment. Someone you’d see again in an hour or aweek or a month, swooping in from the airport, spiral-eyed with jet lag. Someone off at Gorilla Coffee to buy Sumatra Roast, or away at an academic conference, wearing a name tag:
Hi, my name is Bernie
. Someone who would take off the name tag and come back, back home, to me.
    No, this task of grieving was so much more than missing. It was more like homesickness for a home that was no longer there. A home that had been swept away by a tidal wave, or sucked into a giant sinkhole, or knocked down by a bulldozer to make way for a new Bed Bath & Beyond, never to be seen again. This grieving for my husband was like a permanent exile from that lost home. Like an asylum seeker in a strange land, I would have to learn to live in this world, bereft of familiarity, bereft of comfort. Bereft.
    What I would have given to sleep through the night, or at least drive away the nightmares, like the ones where my husband was drowning and I jumped into a churning river to rescue him, knowing it would surely kill me, too, reaching for his hand and missing it by inches as icy waters swept him away. Missing that hand in my dreams every time. More than missing him, every night. Never to be seen again.

    M ONTHS PASSED .
Being a widow didn’t get easier. I began to venture out, where the least trigger prompted me to relive what I came to call The Top Ten Traumatic Moments. Somebody’s vacation photo brought back the first time I saw that scan of the tumor in Bernie’s chest. The sight of a neighborhood restaurant recalled the time he suffered a seizure over dinner at a favorite spot. I triedto talk to friends about some of this, but repeating it mostly fed the panic that was rising in my throat.
    I showed up at work, sometimes carting in remains from the party platters to share with the newsroom. I can’t remember what else, if anything, I did there. Looking in the archives, I see that I wrote a peppy article about celebrity chefs, so I must have given the appearance of playing reporter. But I was missing another story right under my nose, a story that imperiled my future. Through the long slog of Bernie’s illness, I had barely noticed that my job might be disappearing along with my husband as the newspaper industry succumbed to a slow fade of its own. I managed to ignore the evidence, even as co-workers headed for the lifeboats, finding other jobs or quitting to work on their own. But I was still frozen, as I had been in his hospital room, too fragile to face reality, too uncertain to make a change while still absorbing the trauma from such a big one. I couldn’t bring myself to consider conditions that would separate me from my job, the one familiar port in my new world of exile. Maybe it was just as well. If I’d left, I would have wound up flat on my couch every day in sweatpants and fuzzy slippers, alone, watching
One Life to Live
. One more life than I had now.
    In the evenings, stranded on that couch after work, I sometimes gave myself a break from missing the cancer and missing Bernie, which often coalesced into one overwhelming ache of missing, and turned my attention to puzzling out my new place in society. I’d seen the movies, read the books: Old Widow So-and-So was often an outcast, or cursed. In some cultures, she’d be handed off to the husband’s brother like a bag of shabby clothes. I had to admit that my own conception wasn’t much more appealing—a sad sack of an old lady, marginal, helpless, irrelevant, ready for assisted living.
That can’t be me!
I protested.
The only assistance I want in living is from the personal shopper at Barneys!
Here I was—sad, yes, but still able to chuckle when