Dear Walt,

Grief is weird. At the moment, I can’t really tell how much of what I’m blowing out of my nose is related to my crying and how much to the cold you left me with. I think I got the worst of it.

I remember straddling your thigh while you sat at your desk and kissing you fiercely before going to bed a week before December 21st happened. It was a great kiss to end the day. The fact that we never went to bed without resolving anything between us made for an easy sleep.

Right. The one thing I most need to deal with the grief of the present is the one thing the grief of the present has robbed me of. Here I am having to make decisions in a haze. Things like effing healthcare which had a hard deadline and which you and I had so carefully researched and which on the 22nd I had to spend 65 minutes on the phone with the government to resolve since you left when there were only ten days remaining in the year, six of them non-business.

I was thinking earlier that you would SO not put up with me being a blob on the couch crying over you because that’s who you were, so I’m getting up. And I’ll try to do more than move to the bed, knowing that grief is going to gut punch me every day forever. Our daughter in law gave me this quote after you left and I read it countless times daily. I will never be able to put my love for you into words and how that love renders me selfish when it comes to my grief over you.

We were private desert island people. BFFs. We needed no one. You me. Me you. Two halves of one whole isn’t right. The parts of our whole were inseparable. Probably explains why grief has me so leaky. Words pouring out that I probably shouldn’t be saying. Tears flowing. Snot flowing, too. My whole is full of holes. If you were here, you would know how to patch them.