Your death lives in the small spaces...

The times when the children are sleeping, the husband is away, and I am alone. Then I feel the life I have surrounded myself with slip away, layer by layer, until I am standing in the middle of a room, looking around, as though I had never seen it before.

My things, they seem like another's. Someone else must live here, I feel, someone who doesn't have a huge gaping hole in her heart. The colors are too bright and cheerful to have been chosen by me, I long for dark brooding color, the color of mourning.

I can't feel what I need to feel, when it comes to you. I should be so mad I can hardly stand it, you with your brilliant light choosing to take such a stupid risk. You doused that light forever and those of us you used to warm are so very cold without it. I had begun to depend on that light, it filled the shadows of my new home, reminded me of the world I left behind, and promised me sunshine upon my return. But there isn't any sunshine back home, not from you.

You are gone, and with you went the light. Something magical was created when we all met and worked those years, and right now that magical thing is languishing. It is gasping for breath because you were the heart of it all. Without you, we have all scattered.

I should hate you for leaving, but whenever I feel the anger rise, it fades away, shooshing out of me, leaving me deflated and flat.

I can't hate you. I still miss you too much.