I’m so many days into a sorrow unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. Tears burst forth out of nowhere, rage nipping at my heels like an hungry hyena waiting for me to stumble into a briar patch of wrath. Hands shaky and idle all at once, my body jerking forward to complete tasks that my mind won’t attend to. My heart gallops away from me, and I just sit and breathe, dab my eyes, and exclaim in fresh despair: This so ghetto and I hate it here.

I’m shook.

My husband is gone. And I realize how much of a restraint he was for me. I recognize that even in the growing list of often perceived limitations, he was a part of God’s shield for me. Sure, he was a selfish older man for snatching my young self up after so many failed tries at relationships. But I was just as selfish to agree to it. What he had? I wanted. And I could never put my finger on it, never could describe it. All I knew is that wherever he went, I was successfully compelled to be there.

Everyone has been more than kind, stretching out for my already distressed self in ways I could not have thought possible. My work family has gone above and beyond, my friends ready and available for whatever, my family—our family making any and everything possible. But it’s nothing like him being here and it sucks. Big time. And if you’d asked 20 year old me if I’d ever miss my husband? I’d have laughed in your face.

Yet here we are.

My mama is careful (in her anxiously loving way) to remind me that men don’t waste time, don’t pine away for a lost love. And that’s probably true. Biblically speaking, God spoke specifically to ADAM, the male version of humanity that it ain’t good for man to be alone. So I can see how, in a man’s DNA and their experience, that they automatically go searching again for the good thing God told them to find: a wife.

Whoso findeth a wife findeth a good thing, and obtaineth favour of the LORD.

Proverbs 18:22 KJV

He never set the same expectation for a woman. We get a choice. We get to choose. We get to settle into singleness, widowhood like badges of honor and places of status and power. If we can stand the silence. If we can stand to be alone at night. If we are not built into precious precocious wives that men are destined to find.

I say all the time that Spencer was my one—the only one for me. And yet. I can’t help but wondering if that statement is my will, if part of his destiny wasn’t to grow me into the wife I was purposed to be but fought off with audacious abandon. Cuz quite as it’s kept? I’m good at that ish. When I set my mind to it, stop fighting it? I am the kind of woman who brings honor to her husband. Ten toes down. Hard working. Fun and flirty. Cute and clever. Polite and ever serving. Submissive and smart. Cunning and quiet. Deadly and silent. Prayerful and watching. And I have Spencer to thank for it. He caught a wild horse and figured out a way to make it want to be tame for him. Now I’m lost about any other way to be.

I miss him. 3 weeks and 2 days in.

It’s still sharp, this absence. I don’t count it a loss per see cuz to be absent in the body is to be present with the Lord. Period. But the t don’t hurt less, and me like I am? I know it would be easy to shut it off and shut it down. To move on quickly. Find something and someone to do. Somewhere and somehow to be. I’m only 44–in my prime, just making good money and coming into the best years of my life. Years I was swinging into full effect with my Spencer. Years I now have to spend some other way.

What do folks do? I don’t want to pour this oil on someone else, give this capacity that he built up in me to somebody who hasn’t earned it. It seems unfair. I’m probably thinking too far ahead. And also. I think I am not. I do not have the option to grieve long. So I grieve loudly, and publicly. My time to mourn being turned even as I type.