Sometimes it's all I can do to get the dishes and laundry maintained for the day. This morning I said "I'll clean the bathroom at least since I don't think I'll get to cleaning out the garage later." I actually did neither.
I went to see the old man. He had given up on getting out of bed - tired of trying to go on without her. Through my mind passed all of the things I was probably supposed to do and say...get him to the doctor, get him on antidepressants, get him to the dairy queen or out to the lake more often...but what I realized after that barrage, what I'd known really since the moment I'd walked in and seen him lying on his side under the covers at four thirty in the afternoon was that to deprive him of his grief in any way would be highway robbery, that his soul would not be pacified, that the hole in his heart could not be patched over with a flimsy band-aid. So I sat down in the yellow chair next to his bed. I just sat there with him, I opened myself to his pain, I let him give it to me...it wasn't a burden that could be passed on in it's entirety, though, so we shared it. Half of his heavy load lay in my lap, my head lay in my hand, my eyelids lay against my eyes. In silence we shared minutes, shared an hour, I didn't know how to leave. The room darkened, his breathing slowed, became heavy.
I crept out the door to my car, under the waxing moon I cried it out. Sometimes that's really all you can do.