our last conversation was about. Probably nothing. It was probably the same as countless other lunch conversations. Nothing monumental, just love and concern and friendship. A normal conversation with my husband.
Then he’d started walking back to the clinic, but he never made it. A cat had been in the road. An SUV had swerved. The cat was fine. Jonas wasn’t. The SUV hit him straight on. His heart stopped while the paramedics worked on him at the side of the road. They kept trying to get him back, but it never started again.
Too much blunt-force trauma. Too much internal bleeding.
His life gone.
♪♫♪
Jonas’s family descended on my home. They came and they loved. They cried and they cooked. His mother, Louisa, squeezed my hand and hugged me so often that it became too much. We worked together to plan the funeral, pick out a casket, a burial plot, everything.
A huge part of me needed to be surrounded by all of this love. That part of me needed to mourn with people who loved Jonas as much as I had. I tried my best to comfort and to allow myself to be comforted, but the fact was I was the outsider in this family. I didn’t share the history or the biology, and that left me a little apart from everything. By myself. Surrounded but alone. Embraced but forgotten.
I should have told them the news. They had a right to know that part of Jonas would live on with the baby I carried. Jonas had wanted to share the news right after we found out, but I’d asked that we wait. He had so much family to join in the celebration—and I didn’t. It felt unequal and unfair, and I had asked that we just keep it to ourselves for a while. I wanted to revel in the joy of it with just Jonas. I wanted to remain in that state of bliss that only a mother and father of a new life could live in.
And now. Now that I was so, so alone, I didn’t want to share my baby with anyone. He or she was mine, only mine. My comfort and my joy and my bitter, bittersweet ending. So I didn’t tell, not yet. I focused on holding myself together and moving forward with preparations for the funeral.
It wasn’t until Naomi showed up on my doorstep that I truly let my guard down. It was just one day before the funeral, and from that moment on, she was my guardian angel. She stuck by my side when I needed it. She backed off when it became too much. She intervened when Jonas’s family inadvertently asked more of me than I could give. On the day of the funeral, she walked with me to the car, then to my seat in the church chapel, then to the chair at the gravesite with the white cover on it. She covered my hand where it rested over the neatly folded American flag after it was presented to me.
I’ll always remember standing over his grave, watching the man from the funeral home push the button to lower the casket into the ground. I stared with dry eyes as the gleaming wood drew farther and farther away, carrying my husband into the ground, into a darkness that seemed to reach out, tugging at my clothing, begging me to follow.
So similar to when my father had died.
♪♫♪
A week after Jonas’s funeral, an arrangement of flowers arrived. It was big, beautiful, and full of all my favorite flowers. The typed message on the card read I’m so sorry, Libby, but wasn’t signed.
I didn’t let myself think about the unnamed sender for too long. I didn’t let myself catalogue the short list of people who would know my favorite flowers. I just accepted them and put them in the middle of my table where they would provide color for my gray life.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
It had been nine weeks. Nine weeks since the policemen had showed up at my door and toppled the tower of my life.
The sympathy cards had stopped. There were no more flowers or meals from coworkers or neighbors. I was on my own. My coworkers would assume that a friend or relative could look out for me from here on out.
But I didn’t have any relatives.
So it was just me, and my job, and the gaping hole where my Jonas used to be.
When I was ten weeks pregnant—just three weeks after Jonas died—I had gone to