Dear Walt,

I fell apart—again—the last two days for no particular reason, for many particular reasons, for one reason after another, for all the reasons piling on. I got angry and you know why. And I think I was justified. I also got irritated. Another thing you would understand. Or at least something you’d listen to me whine about before giving me that arched brow and shaking your head no.

This is the problem: You were not only my husband, my lover, my constant, my companion in this world, my brainstorming and career partner, you were, you still are, my very best friend.

I don’t have girlfriends who I lunch with or shop with or take power walks with. I have you. We did all these things together. And we talked and talked and talked.

You didn’t have guy friends you did things with. No sports, though you and your son caught a few Astros games over the years. And you did oil and gas seminars and expos with guys you knew. But that was mostly work.

You didn’t go drinking or golfing or whatever. You did family things. We had cookouts and swim parties with the kids and their kids and their friends. You sat and watched the neighbors shoot July 4th and New Year’s Eve fireworks. We visited with the couple next door, the family next to them, others who lived in our cul de sac, but all of it casual chatting about the neighborhood and yard work and what the county was doing about the hundred acre woods and the creeks.

You talked the deep stuff with like-minded people you knew online, arguing on Twitter and Facebook. And with your son. I would listen to the two of you go on and on for hours about geology and climate change and politics and bitcoins and what a pair you two were.

But you and I… Was there anything we didn’t talk about?

And this is why doing the taxes is getting to me. It’s not so much seeing receipts for purchases we made or dinners we ate or movies we saw but not having you here so I could ask what in the world were we thinking, or remember this restaurant and that trip we made when we ended up helping my parents replace their toilet and got a nail in a tire on that section of I35 that ran north from Lake Lewisville?

I can’t stand that I won’t be able to go to Crabby Bill’s or Snapper’s in St. Petersburg with you again, or drive down to Pass-a-Grille for Cuban sandwiches. I’m not even sure I can go to the NINC conference again because that was our thing to do. The beach. The road trip. The fun.

Then there are the long drives we made to Utah when our son and his family lived there and I want to marvel with you again about the herd of elk we saw and the hailstorm we drove through on that snowy trip through Wyoming that one May. No one else was there to know the route you took just so you could show me the snow-covered peaks in that part of Colorado I so love.

I want to watch Game of Thrones and Silicon Valley with you. Those were the only shows we still watched together and talked about after, the plot, the brilliance, the missteps. The night before December 21st happened, you came to bed having watched something about Star Wars. It was the last tweet you made. The link is still there. I should watch, too, because it really impressed you.

And I promise I will watch Your Name. I don’t like anime but you could not stop talking about this movie. I know it disappointed you that I wasn’t interested so we weren’t able to hash it out but we had such different tastes in entertainment. Our last fight, in fact, was about seeing Thor: Ragnarok.

We did, though weeks later than you’d wanted, and neither of us loved it, but in the end, that didn’t matter. We saw it together. We talked about it. We talked and talked and talked.

And talked.