Celebrating My Husband’s Birthday With or Without Him

My husband’s 59th birthday is this week and even though Joel died a few months after he turned 50, I find myself wondering, “How could I be married to someone so old?!” Yes, I still consider him my husband even though he’s been gone for 9 years… nearly a decade — it seems unfathomable!

I’ve also had a boyfriend for the past 8 years. The boyfriend and I aren’t married, we don’t even live together (which could be the secret to our successful relationship) and even though it may seem odd, my boyfriend understands that I’m still married to my late husband. There is room for both of them in my heart and in my life, and the unsettling dreams I used to have about my husband’s confusing return have dissipated.

I have shared extensively about Joel and losing him to MS (Multiple Sclerosis) and West Nile virus. There have been so many essays, so many conversations and of course, there is Widowish, my memoir, which is centered around our life together and what it was like during the first year of my husband’s unexpected death… and yet, I still have so much to say. Grief may get easier to carry, but it never leaves you.

On milestones like Joel’s birthday, I find myself compelled to write more about him even though there are no new stories to share. Maybe this urge is simply to prove that Joel was here, that he had…