I finally have a home, but it doesn’t feel right, because you’re not here.

I never thought this was something I would do without you.

Even as I lay out the space to my exact tastes and comfort, it feels incomplete.

Today I finished the small bedroom that our children will never sleep in. The children we never had.

I attended Grandmom’s burial last weekend, and you weren’t there. I came home from the luncheon afterwards to an empty home.

Last night I found out the dog I hoped would help fill the emptiness of your absence is not permitted to live in this neighborhood, and I felt so alone I almost couldn’t breathe.

Yesterday was my birthday. I turned 43. I went out to a lovely dinner with lovely friends. Some of them talked about their husbands, and all I could think about was all the birthdays that have come and gone without you, and all the years they represent. All the lost memories and adventures, moments and milestones. All the things I expected to share with you. All the things I will never experience at all. And even though I was surrounded by people who love and support me, I could feel the chill of the silence awaiting me at the end of the night while they all returned to their families.

I haven’t stopped crying today. I don’t feel like celebrating—not the birthday, not the home, not the stability that has been so long coming and so painfully achieved without you. All I can do is console myself that there is one less year to survive without you, one less move to start over on my own, one less crisis to weather with no one to hold me at night.

Tomorrow, I will try to convince myself again that I must not need the same companionship and connection that every other human being does. God must have made me differently, otherwise you would be here. I will tell myself that somehow the silence will not swallow me, that a dog will be enough to meet my social and emotional needs. And when that doesn’t work because I know it’s not true, I will convince myself again that I’m not being punished, that my needs do matter, but that I have no other choice but to keep putting one day in front of another, no matter how exhausted I am.

I want to be so angry with you for not being here. I feel betrayed and abandoned and forgotten. I feel ashamed that you left me alone, and ashamed that I still need you after all these years. And furious that there’s nothing I can do about either of those things. But on days like today, what hurts me the most is not that you are not here now. It’s that you never were.

I think if I had loved you for a time, and had been loved in return, that would carry me. I would still miss you, but part of you would be with me in some intangible way. I would still feel your love and see what you saw in me, remember your smile, your embrace, your touch. I would still feel connected to you as you await me in eternity, the way I am with Grandmom.

But I don’t even know what you look like because you didn’t reject me. You never found me, never even saw me. And I don’t know why.

So, I miss you all the way down to my marrow without knowing you at all. I miss the family we never had and the memories we never made. With no happy memories to sustain me, no mementos to cherish, no photos to turn to on days like today, no gravesite to visit, no anniversaries to explain why I am suddenly a shell of myself and cannot hold it together today. This is my life today. And you are not here.