Dating : I Forgot A Thing About Him Today

Today, I forgot A Thing about my late husband. I tried to remember. I could not remember. It was nothing important, this Thing that I forgot. But A Thing that I forgot has now permanently become a question with no answer.

In the past 17 months since his death, I have had moments of worry ranging to borderline panic when I could immediately state or worse, remember, whether he liked Any Particular Thing. Whether he liked root beer, what time he was born, the last four digits of his social, his grocery card phone number, his favorite beer, simply a barrage of important and not important details about him or our lives together.

When I was finally able to answer, with my recall taking varying amounts of time to kick in, relief would rush in. Secretly, I had been growing deeply alarmed that I forgot So Many Things and I silently dreaded the first time that I would forget A Thing and no amount of thinking or even asking around would bring back the answer. You know, from the dead.

Today was that day. I forgot A Thing.

After I finally stopped fighting to remember This Thing and allowed myself to realize this information about him was simply gone, time in my head was slowed down to the pace of a fat caterpillar crawling up a tasty branch, because I didn’t know how to feel a complex set of emotions simultaneously. Just then, like the day he died, I felt tremendously guilty, heavily sad, and just stunned.

He is disappearing if I forgot Things about him. What will happen if I forget too much about him? What will happen if I forget something important next time? Then what happens if I forget a lot of important things? I am the sole bearer of the totality of his memories. What if I forgot Many Many Things over time? I cannot let any of this happen or this will mean that ….

I don’t love him anymore.

There it is, my deepest fear. If I truly love him, if I truly loved him then, how could I possibly forget anything at all about him?

Pushing it all back with a mighty mental shove, I refuse to succumb to guilt, the sadness and and fight through my momentary astonishment. I reach up to the light because forgetting is not …..

…. Forgetting.