Losing Him Every Day

She tells me that she feels she loses him again and again every morning when she wakes up alone and goes downstairs to make coffee in the deafening silence of her empty house.

When she comes home from an outing or work she feels it again. There is no one home. Even if a child or a grandchild happens to be visiting that day, there will never again be anyone home in a true sense.

Shabbos is torture. Yom Tov is a struggle to keep it together. Simchahs are a wrenching tsunami of conflicting emotions. At a kiddush, a wedding, a bar mitzvah, everyone is there with their spouse, and she is conscious of nothing so much as that she is there alone. There can be no succor for this pain this side of the World to Come, and this frightening knowledge is another of her burdens.

Perhaps you can contemplate the joy and the anguish Faigy felt at the bris of her grandson when they gave him her husband’s name. But can you contemplate the loneliness she felt when she drove home afterward, alone again, to her house with the silence of a mausoleum?