It’s been seven hours and fifteen days
Since you took your love away…

Lyrics from Nothing Compares 2 U – Sinead O’Connor
Writer/s: Prince Rogers Nelson
Publisher: Universal Music Publishing Group

Those words strike so poignantly as I now view time with the lens of before and after Hunter died. It’s been seven hours, three hundred forty-one days, and six years since I learned that Hunter had died. In big round numbers, that’s three hundred forty-two days and six years since his documented death date. So, if you ask me now how long ago he died, I’d say, “…coming on seven years on December 4th.” All events are put into the context of ‘before or after Hunter died.’ Kind of like before or after Christ, but, yeah, not really, but I do understand why Christians view time that way. I mean, I do now.

Fuck. I say “fuck” a lot now. I guess I always have said “fuck” a lot. Seems like more now. I know I sigh a lot. Big sighs. I was a sighing machine the first few months (years?) after Hunter died. I didn’t even realize it until our son Jake told me. “Mom, jeez, you’re sighing all the time! Loudly.” I guess that would be pretty irritating. It was a physical reaction to the astonishment I felt each time reality seeped into my brain, saying, “Hunter died.” My body, very naturally, simply took a deep breath and pushed it out. A way for me to stabilize. A way to keep standing, sitting, or simply be. I’ll bet I sighed nearly a hundred times a day. Because it was a continual shock to realize that he was gone. It took years to accept, truly accept, that it wouldn’t change. He really wasn’t going to come back. And there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it.

I’m a thinker. I like to use my rational brain. I’ve spent years honing my analytical skills. My education was as an engineer. My career was in a company that focused on science. It was all about problem-solving, optimizing, finding the critical path, and creating a unique solution. Yet I couldn’t think my way out of this box. Fuck. You’re starting to get it. Fuck means I’m at a dead end. My mind will keep searching for solutions to the dilemma of Hunter dying. When I think I’d found a solution, my mind would query, “Is that really true? How could that be disproved? What is the next logical conclusion? Does that make sense?” Invariably, I’d realize, “Fuck.” Dead is dead.

Please don’t start with religious beliefs. I’m happy if that works for you. It doesn’t work for me. I’ve educated myself on the gamut of ‘what happens to us after we die’ beliefs from Christianity to Judaism to Buddism to Native American spirituality. Nice concepts, all. Not buying it. Seems that throughout time, we humans have been looking for ways to deal with the grief of losing our dearest and most loved ones. What if they are simply gone, and we must deal with that? What then? That’s what I ask. How do I keep living without this most precious person?

That’s what I’d like to deal with here. How do we live? How do we truly live again when all the assumptions we’d made about our value in life are in question because this absolutely fundamental piece of our world, this person, is no longer here living with us?

What do you think?
Ingrid

November 10, 2023
6 years and 342 days