Eventually, I hope to arrange into short chapters a kind of spiritual memoir about the Apostrophe of time and perception – the time out – the contraction – that was my October, November, and December of 2025. I put a lot of it onto Facebook posts as it was happening. And I have been living through the agonies and bereavements of every day since the first day of 2026, when I drove the car carrying my husband away from his home – the home of his grandparents and great grandparents. He will never be back. Or, at least, he will never be back in the body, in this life, in his mortality.

Some people do get to come home, I know. Some people go “into care” and are able to visit their home and family on weekends or holidays or just for a dinner once in a while. Those are people who moved away before they became completely incapacitated. We left it until the very last possible moment, when staying home had become impossible, and there is now no capacity for his traveling anywhere. He is on Hospice now, so he won’t even be traveling to a hospital. Each time I visit him, I know we are together in the house where he will die.

In other words, my husband is gone.

I got to thinking about it this week and I finally saw something that’s been in plain sight all along. It has been nearly five months after we put clothes (too many) and a few books (he has never opened them) into a clothes basket we could unpack and bring home empty, and put him into the passenger seat. This week I think I might have figured out how to live through what comes next.

It’s all moral. Right? It’s all mortal. There is no such thing as a marriage that lasts forever in this life, in this mortal flesh. “I’ll love you forever” is how it feels. But all marriages end, and if we’re blessed, they end this way. In death. It was never true that I was going to be able to arrange the details. I was never going to be able to choose, consumer-style, the means and manner of this part of our lives. This end part, I mean. Living “right.” Being “healthy.” Avoiding synthetic foods, synthetic cleaning products, synthetic relationships — even if I had a house that contained no plastic or even microplastics — if I lived as nervously zealous as the crazed Howard Hughes, arranging everything to keep even the smallest germ away from me — it was still always going to come to this. And he is older. He is a man. He was always most likely to precede me in death. So here we are.

Okay, so that’s obvious enough. But the cry of my heart for these five months has been, “HOW?” How do I accept this?

This week I remembered what happened the night I chose the engulfing flame of our autumn’s Apostrophe.

We were more than two months into it, I think. I had been so angry. Holding myself so tightly, gritting my teeth, trying so very hard not to come unglued. But on that night, after I had settled him onto the bed in the living room and turned out the lights and put the Agni Parthene on a loop on the stereo, I went upstairs to face my icons in my bedroom and sob out my anguish and make my choice. I had been missing that space of time right before sleep. He had started sleeping in the living room a few years before, and my routine had become: a last few words, go upstairs, put on my pajamas, kneel down, and pray. But at the end of September everything changed, and it had been weeks since I’d been alone anywhere, much less in my room. That night, at the prompting of a friend, I went back. I made sure he was settled, and then, like a little kid imitating an icon of Christ in the garden, I knelt and I said I didn’t want to do this. And then I said “not my will but Thine be done.” These were not saintly words. They were childish. They were sincere, and clueless, and helpless. And real.

This week, that night swam back into my memory, and I found that I could do it again. I could choose this coming widowhood not by surrendering to the inevitable, but by choosing it. On purpose. I know I’m still clueless and helpless. I do know that. But I know this also. In my life, God gave me the shining gift of a man who loved me, loved all of me, loved me all the way through everything, and spent his life giving me to myself most of all. He wasn’t afraid of my ideas and he did not want me to shut up or to take it easy or to leave him alone. (Okay, sometimes he wanted me to take it easier. There’s a point where full steam ahead is really dumb, and he could tell me when I was being really dumb. I learned to listen.)

This gift? This gift of such a marriage to such a man? It came from God. It came from God as surely as anything else in this life does, and now I can give it back with tearful thanks and a shaky smile, like a little kid surrendering the puppy he found, back to its owner who has turned up looking for it. That living thing – that sweet, warm, wriggling, ridiculous thing – it belonged and still belongs to its owner who loves it.

Thanks for letting me have an afternoon. I tried to take good care of it. I named it, but You know its real name.

That’s how this feels.