It Took Me 7 Years To Bury My Husband. Here’s What I Learned About Grief During That Time.

I placed the box on the security conveyor belt, then hefted my bulging backpack into a bin and pushed it into the scanner. When the screener, a young woman about my daughter’s age, noticed me, I patted the box.
“It’s cremains.”
“Thank you for telling us,” she said, “so we can be sure to treat it with the utmost respect.”
After a careful inspection, she handed the box to me. “I’m sorry for your loss,” she said, her tone making clear she meant it. “Thanks,” I said, nodding, and then headed toward the gate for my flight to meet my now-grown kids.
My husband, Kai, died seven years earlier. His diagnosis had come too late for any meaningful medical action, and the cancer killed him in just five months.
He had been active and in excellent health. The kids were close to college graduation, and we’d had so many plans for our empty-nest stage: international travel, beach sunrises, books to read and write. Maybe spoiling grandchildren someday.
The future we’d planned for and dreamed about was like pages ripped out of a book and burned, never to be read.
The shock of his death was overwhelming. A burial and a memorial service were totally out of the question. The grief was somehow too immense — too personal — to share.
In the “before” time, I was hypervigilant and super organized. I jokingly referred to myself as a type A-plus.
When Kai died, I lost my capacity to hold a thought — my ability to focus. I left my keys in the door lock and put laundry away in the refrigerator.
I have no real memory of the months after his passing. Each day felt like a restless sleepwalk. I’d “wake” to find myself at the grocery store holding a box of his favorite cereal with no idea how I got there and no awareness of how long I had been blankly staring at it.
I was a stranger to myself. One moment I’d be totally numb, and the next I’d silently rage against a guy across the street who had the audacity to be alive, minding his own business.
Worst of all was the silence. Not just the quiet house, but the oppressive absence of our shared life. No more text messages pinging back and forth, the “I love yous,” funny memes, frustrating work moments to share. No more sweet notes tucked into purses or wallets, underneath car keys, stuck to the bathroom mirror.
We’d done most everything together, rarely spending more than a night apart.
And suddenly, our ongoing conversation, our life together, was just … over. Full stop. I was his widow, not his wife. In an instant, the world I knew became utterly foreign.
It’s basic brain physiology that our habits — repeated actions, thoughts, routines — literally carve grooves into our brains.
That’s why our couple language shorthand and inside jokes worked, through many years of repetition and deep knowledge of a shared life.
With my life partner unceremoniously ripped from my life, my brain, in a very real sense, had no idea what to do. It had to stop and start constantly, learn to forge new pathways from point A to point B — pathways that did not include Kai — over and over. I had to try to carve a groove that matched my new reality.
Even though years have gone by, I still pick up my phone to text him before my brain remembers. The shock of it comes again, new and fresh, like it just happened.
I experience these moments either like the pop of a firecracker or hitting a brick wall.
For so long, it was difficult to think of anything else. The sheer sadness of my grief was bottomless.
Easier to deal with was the anger — at other people, at what the four of us had been cheated of, at life, at God. At least the anger felt active — something I was doing rather than something being done to me.
We don’t usually talk about grief as trauma, yet that’s exactly what it is. It’s not something you eventually get through, like a trip to the dentist. As years multiply, the black clouds lift for longer periods in between. But they’ll never dissipate completely. Grief becomes just as much a part of you as your own hands.
In a way, my tragedy — Kai’s tragedy — was not so very great. We’ll all die someday, and what a ridiculous notion that we have any control over the manner and place and circumstances.
But we were so young. It was so unexpected. We had so much ahead of us.
Of course, despite the trauma that changes everything, the moment after which nothing can ever be the same again, life does somehow still go on. The Earth keeps turning.
The “dates of significance” aren’t worse than other days for me. I don’t miss Kai more on his birthday, or the anniversary of his death, or our wedding anniversary than I do on an ordinary Tuesday.
It boggles my mind that someone so full of life just isn’t still here, in the flesh. The annual recurrence of time-marked milestones just brings it all to the forefront of my mind.
So, on what would have been our 30th wedding anniversary, I realized Kai deserved a better resting place than in a box tucked on the high shelf in the corner of my closet.
It was time to take him — his physical remains, at least — to the extended Kiser family plot high in the Blue Ridge Mountains, a place that Kai always thought of as home.
At the cemetery, the kids and I stood together in the sun, listening to the breeze through the familiar mountain grass. Seven years is a long time, but it’s also just a blip. And this realization led to the next: the awareness that my kids will do this same thing in the same place again someday. For me.
That knowledge punched me in the gut. A forward-looking grief, on their behalf, to a time of even more pain I can’t protect them from.
There are no orderly stages of grief. Grief is a Mobius strip circling back on itself forever. It’s not a straight line that marches in a predictable direction.
To quote my son, “You don’t miss him less. You just get a little better at missing him.”
“He loved us more than anything,” I said, wiping my eyes at the grave site. “More than anything.”
We know, they nodded.
The trauma of grief isn’t the only thing that stays with us. Love does, too.
Helene Kiser is currently working on a memoir. Founder of the Butterfly Blueprint and writer of the free weekly Editorial Notes newsletter, she teaches other writers how to self-edit like a pro. Find her online at helenekiser.com and @HeleneTheWriter.
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