The holidays are bearing down on me like a freight train. I feel like I’ll go through this next few months saying “Six months gone…survived it – check. Veteran’s Day…survived it – check. My birthday – check. Thanksgiving – check. Christmas – check. Lillian’s First Birthday – check. Scott’s birthday – check.” And I wish there would be some kind of sigh of relief at the end of all of that but there cannot be. If only I did have to survive just one year of him being gone and then he’d be back, like a far-away military deployment, but it won’t be like that. It will never be like that.

I feel myself sinking deeper as we get closer. And I don’t even think it’s only that. Is it getting closer to these holidays that we celebrated and spent with our family? Or is it that every day closer to those days is a day farther from the last time I was with him? I can’t tell. I’m not focusing on the holidays with dread (although I do not feel ease going into them this year either.) I’m not specifically trying to focus on how long he’s been gone. But the tenth of the month just keeps on coming back around, for crying out loud.

The sinking seems to be a phenomenon all its own. A chaotic spiral over which I have no control to avoid the suction, much like the approach of a tornado toward your home. I still have faith that God will bring me out into the light but that doesn’t prevent the bleak and frightening outlook of the dark while I’m in it.

I went to the cemetery today…well, it’s yesterday now. I sat at his grave for nearly two hours. I played music on my phone. I picked all of the weeds and leaves off. I took implements to allow me to clean his grave marker. I added a flag honoring Veteran’s Day, honoring him. I have already purchased flags for Thanksgiving and Christmas to put there soon. The Christmas one has a photo of him, smiling and handsome, sitting on the lap of a fake Santa. I took that picture when we went to Savannah together.

Mostly, though, I cried. I ugly cried. I sobbed. I asked why (again.) I didn’t think I’d stay that long but I found it difficult to leave, despite the fact that I know that is not his place of residence. Mostly I feel closer to him at home than anywhere else. But that place is a home to my grief. It is the representation of the fact that even though his body is on this earth…in this earth…he is not. It is a quiet place of emptiness that mirrors the way my life feels without him here. I don’t talk to him much there (like I do more so at home) because the cemetery represents the fact that he is not here. But I also didn’t want to leave him there. Such a strange paradox.

I remember the night when my nephew died, when it came time for us to leave my sister’s home, still crawling with police officers and investigators, and go somewhere else to stay the night. My sister said “I can’t leave him here; I don’t want to leave him here.” As a parent, we would never leave our child alone in a houseful of strangers. You’d take him with you. But leaving nails the first level of finality right through your skin. I felt the same way leaving the hospital that night. I didn’t want to leave him there. I was supposed to stay the night with him. I was supposed to drive him home in the morning. Nail. Nail. Nail.

I don’t know how many nail holes you have in you when grief allows the curtain to part to begin letting light in again. I know it’s a lot. Pour water in and I’d leak like a sieve right now already. Need a sprinkler to water your lawn? I’m your huckleberry. And I guess I still have room for more holes because I didn’t want to leave again yesterday. I actually had an incredibly strong urge to lay down there, right on the dirt. Instead, I sat Indian-style with my elbows on my knees and my head in my hands for most of the time. Thankfully, he’s way out in the country so no one else was at the cemetery to witness my profound grief.

Then I decided to push through more time in the day by stopping at the theater on the way home. I sat, completely alone in an empty Saturday-afternoon theater, and watch the After Death movie by Angel Studios. For today, I’m reserving my thoughts about it because I’m still processing what I saw. I did cry. I also felt comfort at some parts. I felt the choking feeling of being in the hospital room a few times. Now I’m mentally processing the scientific process with which they documented facts vs. potential hallucinatory effects. And there were irrefutable facts. I’m leveling that with what I know about life after death from a Biblical perspective and then how all of that relates to what my husband is now experiencing, what he experienced on that night. I do know that they reviewed hundreds of what they call NDEs (near death experiences) although those who experienced them were actually clinically dead for a period of time before being resuscitated. One particular line stuck with me over which I am still pondering the full significance: “Doctors resuscitate their patients; they don’t resurrect them.” And yet some of these people were clinically dead or without oxygen for up to 90 minutes.

The recurrent theme for me, throughout the entire documentary, was that I wished Scott were here, watching this movie with me, and telling me if that’s what it was really like. Because he had come back when they resuscitated him. I could almost hear him saying “that’s pretty much what it was like” or “I didn’t feel/see/experience that part.”

And then I think of the parts of the movie where people described being greeted or welcomed or even guided by others they had loved and who had already passed…

And so my countdown to someday is still on. Someday my prince will come…and he’ll take me to meet my King, face-to-face.