For the six-month anniversary of his passing, I visited his grave. It was hard for me to do because, as I've mentioned, seeing his grave, standing there, would be the final acknowledgement that he is gone. As long as I didn't see it, I could pretend to myself he was just away for a while, deployed somewhere or off on a business trip and he'd be back by and by, just as always.
Of course, I was at the funeral, but I was in such an emotional state that I pretended I hallucinated that, or I just pushed it out of my mind, as I do so many things I don't want to think about.
Anyway, I went, forced myself. I dearly did not want to. But I felt an obligation. I could not abandon him, leave him neglected, but I did not want to feel all the rush of crushing emotions fresh again. But I went.
I am turned to stone.
And I felt nothing. Nothing. I looked down at the grave. It was just a grave. He was not there. I can't explain what I felt now. I am just remembering what I remember of how I felt, not experiencing what I felt at that moment. But it was the least expected thing. Nothing. Just nothing. I studied the ground around the grave and the grave itself. I noted bits of earth, twigs, grass stems that were exactly as they had been on that cold, windy, bleak January day. I hadn't realized that I had noticed them at the time, but standing there in the heat of July, the sun beating down, I saw them as I saw them then. Burned into my brain. The trivial. The inconsequential. But my Jeff, my dearest one.... No. Nothing. Nothing. He was not there. I was alone.
I'd brought a lock of my hair and I tucked it down beside the headstone. I did that. Then I left. But then I thought, no, what I felt can't have been right, can't have happened. I must have missed something. I returned to the grave. Stood there. Nothing. It was as if the grave were empty or I was standing beside the grave of someone I never knew, some stranger. But more like it wasn't even really a grave, just a plot of grass among a lot of other plots of grass in a curious field full of curious stone markers.
