Matthew

I wake up everyday to go to work, well technically every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. It’s been seven months now and it’s slowly beginning to feel like life is back to normal, like I can function again, like nothing happened.
Conversations about death are always diplomatic. We don’t want to enflame so we use substitute words or sentences like “My wife has passed away”. “Funke is gone”. “She went to rest.” Maybe. The reality is that Funke died 7 months ago last Friday. I knew her, I touched her, I felt her, and now she is gone, forever.
We substitute when we talk about death because we want to protect: the bereaved, ourselves and our loved ones. I remember thinking during the funeral, you know when after the actual burial we all convene to the bereaved house — in this case our house — to ‘share’ in something — God knows what, I remember thinking “what is it that they are trying to protect?” “What is it that I am trying to protect?”.
My heart sank when I was told. Nicole called me that day and the memories are only just crawling back up. I was depressed. I thought I could ‘man’ my way through it and returned to work the next Monday. Everyone was surprised but also too protective — of me? — to tell me anything. My desk on that Monday was crowded with cards, nice notes and some of my overdue tasks. I cleared them all, putting the ‘death-related’ items in my backpack and organising my workload.
But I didn’t know who I was up against. I lasted exactly nine working days before I stopped going to work. I woke up that day and I remember not feeling like it. I decided not to get up, to just stay there, to hide, to coward away.
I cried.
I remembered being told that she was a couple of weeks pregnant.
I cried some more.