A Love Letter to My Husband by Louann Carroll

I wake each morning with the same heaviness in my chest. It screams at me either to get up or stay in bed, but stop ruminating on the pain and the anger that consume me. Imagine a roaring lion bellowing in your face for hours until you are so tired you can do nothing but sleep. But still, you're awake at three a.m. to do it all over again.

Even after five years, the house still feels too large without him. His footsteps echo. I hear his voice. I feel his touch. I still don’t understand how he can be here one day and gone the next. Our children, though grown and married, still need him. He will never hold his great-grandchildren, but I remind myself that at least he held his grandchildren, and they have wonderful memories.

None of us are here forever. There is much to be grateful for.

I fill my days with whatever I can create, fix, clean, plant, or mow. I play pickleball so hard that adrenaline floods me, and the pain of a fractured femur is but a memory. I stay in motion until my legs tremble at night. I believe that if I stop for even a moment, I will shatter.

Anger lives inside me like a second heartbeat. I am angry at him for leaving and at God for taking him. I am furious with myself for not knowing how to live without him. I know he has tried to contact me, but I shut him out. I don’t want to feel the emptiness, the suffering he caused me. I hear his laugh as if he were in the room. I push it away. I use anger to get through it. I tell him to stop, that I’m not ready.

I also realize that at some point, I must accept the inevitable. Just not yet. I’ve drowned my grief in noise and movement. I spend money on ridiculous things, thinking new experiences will drown the pain. I buy clothes I’ll never wear and gadgets that sit in drawers. I contemplate a man who smiled too easily and cared too little. I just didn’t want to face the pain.

Last week, on our son’s birthday, I sat at the table with a card in front of me. My hands shook as I wrote the words: I love you, Son. Mom. I stared at it as the ink dried. Suddenly, the room fell still, much like the day my husband died. My breath caught in my throat. Then I heard it. Clear and warm. “Happy birthday, Son.”

I froze. The pen slipped from my fingers. I knew that voice. I knew the softness, the way he always said the word: Son. With pride. I looked around the room, knowing he wasn’t there, but looking for him anyway. I pressed my hand to my chest and, for the first time since he died, let myself feel everything. The grief. The love. The truth.

He had been there. Through the reckless spending. Through running away. Through the nights when I cried on my pillow and screamed at him. He stayed with me because he had promised never to leave me. His last words to me were, "I got so many things wrong. But I love you.” And then he kissed me good-bye. He died minutes later. 

I close my eyes and whisper his name. The anger slips away, leaving the love that carried us through more than fifty years. A love that did not end with his last breath.
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A love that simply changed its shape.