I can’t believe that a week has passed already. It feels like a day. It feels like 10 years. I feel like there is no sense of time at all. I am in a fog. I am dizzy all the time and I feel like I’m going to hurt myself terribly pretty much any minute. My life is going to get so small. I am going to stay home where I can butt scoot up and down stairs because I don’t feel stable.

I am so scared. Noah has been my bulwark in this life. I don’t want to face the world without him. It sounds horrible and awful and unfair in ways I don’t even know how to wrap my brain around. There are so many tiny what if’s. If he hadn’t broken his ankle. If he hadn’t had surgery. If he hadn’t taken medication. If If If If If If.

There is no fair when it comes to death. Even if someone lives a long time, that doesn’t mean their death is just. Maybe it should have come 50 years earlier and it is no fair that it waited so long.

I have never before noticed how well suited to keening the name “Noah” is.

I have no hope for my future. It will get smaller and more painful with every passing year. I will struggle on to raise my babies. I don’t think I can promise them companionship in their old age. I hope they will forgive me when I need to join their father. I miss Noah. I don’t want to live without him. I will. I have to. I don’t have a choice. I will raise our babies and I will ensure they are as stable and resilient as possible when they become adults but I am broken. This was my chance at a happy family.

I will always know that once I was loved. Once I was loved to distraction and beyond. Once I was everything to one person. He walked through fire for me over and over. In contrast I’m just going to have to keep moving in a frozen hell of pretended normal life. I will never be like everyone else and it doesn’t matter. I will go through the motions of a life but I will be watching through a screen.

I no longer have Noah justifying my existence and writing me permission slips to be in rooms. I no longer have the fact that Noah loves me more than everyone else in the whole world combined to make me feel like I am ok; maybe I am even good. If someone as wonderful as Noah would pick me maybe I am not all bad? If someone like Noah would decide that I was worth working like a demon for to ensure my safety? Maybe I’m not worthless?

Now Noah is gone. The vast majority of our money is tied in up accounts I can’t touch till I’m 67. Once I hit 67, I am set. That’s 24 years in between. I have 11 years, a month, and 14 days until I am done having a minor child. I don’t know yet, but I think we will get child support money from social security in the US. There’s the bank shares money that comes in every year. There is life insurance money. There are Noah’s parents. I’ll bridge the gap; I think.

I never fucking wanted to be a rich widow. This is not why I invested money. I invested money so I could take care of Noah. I was making sure Noah would be safe as he rode out his old age. That’s what I was doing. I am going to keep it and use it to take care of his babies.

We will have fun in the future. We will have adventures. We will explore. We will learn and grow. We aren’t going to stop. Noah would never forgive me if I stopped or if I didn’t push his kids to keep going. We will fucking go. I will be the motor for a long time until they are launched.

Do I want to live that long? 24 years without Noah? Oh my god that makes me shake so hard. Noah. Noah I need you. How could you go? How could you let your body stop? How could something so small stop you?

How could a cockroach like me be the last one standing? I may wobble and look like shit when I walk but I’m mother fucking cruising on like I can’t be stopped.

I wished I believed in Gods so that I could believe that the suffering in my life was because they chose me for punishment for some reason. That I think I could honestly wrap my head around and respect.

Why in the fuck was I so driven to have children? Why wasn’t I happy with just Noah? I am feeling absolutely overwhelmed with grief and I am very upset that suicide is not something I can consider. Every time the thought tries to start “I want to” there is a glitch. No. That is no longer something that is available to me in this life. My children have suffered enough. I can’t want that. Not even in the privacy of my mind, never again. I have to honor Noah.

I have so many regrets right now. I am drowning in them. Did I really serve him as well as he deserved? He never got to be the complete sole focus of my attention and I regret that so much. If I had known that I would have such a short time with him, what choices would I have made?

He died for stupid reasons. He died because everyone has to die. He died because when you read statistics about what could happen if you have surgery or take medication or or or or or or or you never think that one in a million death will be you today. Noah got a higher than average number of lottery ticket wins in this life. His luck ran out.

I don’t particularly want to keep breathing if I won’t have Noah to hold me. I will though. I will keep breathing and eating and sleeping and moving. I will raise my children well. I will earn them sitting by my bedside someday with smiles when I am sick enough that I am allowed to go see their dad. I miss you, Noah.

I know exactly which hangdog expression he would make when I cry, “You weren’t supposed to leave me.” He hangs his head and says, “I know.”

We don’t get to choose what happens to us. There is no deserve. There is no fair in this fuckhole I call life.

I am so angry that a fucking rapist wrecked the last 5 months of my marriage. I have been so fucked up. Noah has been doing work all day almost every day taking care of me and trying to help me calm down. I feel like I let him down by being so weak. I should have been giving to him.

I am trying to think of all the accommodations I am going to need to ask for: like I need Shortie’s teachers to see me write down the things they need me to know in the notebook I am carrying around. If I don’t write it down I cannot be trusted to remember it. Assume I am incapable of forming new memories for the next while. I am going to be in a deeply dissociated state most of the time.

There is a reason I am asking visitors to be spaced out over time. I am worried about my ability to fully stay in the present tense and an outside adult forces me back into reality. This is not a constant problem, but it has been a problem over the last five months and I expect it to get much worse. I am actually literally afraid of being alone right now. I am afraid I will take myself outside in 0 degree weather and stay for hours. Not smoking, just sitting outside until I hurt myself.

I don’t think I’d push it all the way to damage.

I know I won’t if someone is here with me. I am grateful to the friends who are volunteering. I hope this actually works out. I’m scared. The future looks so terribly bleak. For a time I was the most important person in the world to the best man I’ve ever met.

Now I am just a cockroach who won’t fucking die.