My Wife Died Yesterday but I still See Her
Of course, it wasn’t a slow, painful death; quite the opposite, actually. She had been complaining for a few days about a dull pain in her left abdomen. Nothing dramatic. I took her to the doctor yesterday. Stepped out for an hour; a work call I couldn’t ignore. When I returned, the doctors told me she was gone.
It made no difference to me.
Perhaps it should have. But you can’t force a man to cry when his soul has already shriveled into something dry and soundless. There’s this unspoken rule; that loss must be loud, teary, cinematic. But grief, like most things, is quiet and absurd.
No one prepares you for the silence. Not the kind that surrounds you but the kind that comes from you. When someone near you dies, your first instinct is to turn to your loved one, the one who helps you make sense of the senseless. We had done that for many years, Emi and I. It would always come from a phone call and then I would turn to her. “Uncle Eli passed away”.
What would come forward would be a series of shared gestures, a kiss, perhaps a hug here and there. To give reassurance to each other, to make sense of the chaos within.
Twenty-three years is a lifetime disguised as borrowed time. That’s twenty-three birthdays, eighteen Valentine’s Days, and at least seventy funerals and odd events and through every one of them, she stood beside me.
But now that someone of mine is gone. And I don’t know who I’m supposed to say those things to anymore.
I keep expecting to feel something more. Anger. Collapse. A scream trying to crawl its way out of my throat. But there’s nothing. Just the knowledge that the world continues; coffee still brews, inboxes still fill, streets still hum with tired people pretending not to notice how absurd it all is.
Maybe that’s the real tragedy. Not that she died. But that it didn’t stop anything. It was the day after yesterday, the morning dew was still fresh, a cold breeze flew from the window and I felt chills in my body. Even though they had asked me to take the week off; it didn’t matter to me. What was I supposed to do? I was already late for work.
They asked me if I’d like to say a few words. I said, ‘She’s dead.’ That was enough. Anything more would’ve been dishonest.
I went home after the hospital because that is what people do. No one had told me otherwise. The elevator smelled faintly of disinfectant and burnt wiring, as it always had. My reflection in the steel doors looked unchanged, which felt like a kind of insult. I half expected grief to rearrange my face, to leave a visible mark, some bruise that might warn others to tread carefully. But the man staring back at me looked like someone returning from a long meeting.
The apartment was quiet in the way only familiar places can be. Not empty—just uninterested. Her shoes were by the door, angled inward as if she had kicked them off carelessly. I considered moving them. I didn’t. It occurred to me, briefly, that I might never move them again. The thought felt less tragic than logistical.
I put my keys in the bowl. One key too many now. I stood there longer than necessary, waiting for something to happen. Nothing did.
The refrigerator light came on when I opened it, obedient as ever. Leftover soup. Milk nearing its expiration date. She had circled it in pen the night before. I could see her handwriting clearly tight, decisive, faintly irritated by inefficiency. I drank the milk anyway. It tasted the same.
The phone rang while I was standing in the kitchen. I let it ring twice longer than I should have, just to see if the sound would provoke anything inside me. It didn’t. When I answered, it was my sister. Her voice had acquired that careful softness people reserve for hospitals and funerals. She asked how I was holding up.
“I’m fine,” I said, which was not a lie. It simply wasn’t an answer.
She paused, waiting for elaboration. I gave her none. Eventually she filled the silence herself, telling me about traffic, about her children, about how strange the weather had been lately. We both pretended this was helpful. When we hung up, I felt relieved, as though I had passed an exam without studying.
That night, I slept on my side of the bed. The other side remained untouched; the sheet still folded back from where she had risen that morning. I noticed the indentation where her body had been, already beginning to fade. It struck me then that memory is more durable than matter, and that this, too, felt unfair.
I woke sometime past midnight. The room was dark, but not entirely. Streetlight spilled through the blinds in thin, uneven stripes. For a moment only a moment I thought she was sitting at the edge of the bed.
I didn’t scream. I didn’t move. I watched.
She wasn’t solid. Not exactly. She looked like a recollection that hadn’t fully decided whether to stay. Her hair was the way she wore it when she didn’t expect company. Her hands were folded in her lap.
“You’re late,” she said.
The voice was right. That was the unsettling part. Not the presence, but the accuracy.
“I know,” I replied.
She nodded, as if this settled something. Then she was gone.
In the morning, I showered longer than usual. I wondered briefly whether I should tell someone about the night. Then I wondered who that someone would be. The doctor? My sister? A man on the street? The idea felt ridiculous. Instead, I dried off, dressed, and went to work.
Work was unchanged. That was its virtue. My inbox was full. Deadlines persisted. Someone asked if I could take a look at a draft before lunch. I said yes. Around noon, a colleague placed a hand on my shoulder and said he was sorry for my loss. His hand lingered too long, as though waiting for me to collapse into it. I thanked him. He looked disappointed.
At lunch, I ate alone. The cafeteria television was playing a game show. People were winning small amounts of money and reacting as though it mattered. I found this mildly comforting.
That evening, there were forms. Death certificates. Insurance claims. Forms that reduced her to checkboxes and signatures. Married. Female. Deceased. I signed my name repeatedly, each time a little less carefully than before. My hand cramped. It felt good to have a physical sensation that could be explained.
I began to notice her presence more often after that. Not always visibly. Sometimes it was just the sense that I was being watched with familiar impatience. Sometimes she corrected me when I reached for the wrong mug. Sometimes she stood in the doorway while I brushed my teeth, shaking her head slightly, the way she used to when she wanted me to notice something obvious.
“You’re doing it wrong,” she said one night as I folded laundry.
“There’s no wrong way,” I replied.
“There is,” she insisted. “You’re mixing things that shouldn’t be mixed.”
I looked down. I was folding her clothes.
I stopped doing that after.
People kept asking if I needed anything. I learned to say no quickly. The faster I answered, the less they insisted. One woman from work brought over a casserole I didn’t eat. It sat in the refrigerator until it spoiled. Throwing it away felt wasteful. Keeping it felt dishonest.
At the funeral, I stood where I was told to stand. I shook hands. I accepted condolences. Someone said she was in a better place. I wondered where that was, exactly, and whether she would find it boring.
When it was time for me to speak, I repeated what I had said before.
“She’s dead.”
There was a murmur of discomfort. Someone coughed. I stepped down.
That night, she sat beside me on the couch. The television was on, though neither of us watched it.
“You embarrassed them,” she said.
“They’ll recover.”
She smiled at that. It was a small, private smile, the kind she used to save for moments when the world disappointed her.
“You’re handling this strangely,” she added.
“I always do.”
She reached for my hand. I felt nothing. That frightened me more than her being there.
The days continued. They stacked on top of one another with bureaucratic indifference. I returned to routines out of habit rather than necessity. Coffee in the morning. Work. Dinner. Sleep. She appeared less often now, but when she did, she was sharper, more insistent.
“You’re pretending,” she accused one night.
“So are you.”
That made her laugh.
I began to wonder whether grief was something that happened to you, or something you had to agree to participate in. The world, after all, had not paused. It had barely noticed. And perhaps that was the point. Perhaps the absurdity lay not in her death, but in my expectation that it would mean something beyond itself.
What bothered me most, in those first days, were the trivialities. The refrigerator hummed too loudly at night. The hallway light flickered before settling, a delay of half a second that made no practical difference but irritated me beyond reason. I found myself standing in the kitchen at odd hours, staring at a crack in the wall we had once agreed not to fix because it gave the place “character.” I hated it now. Not because she was gone, but because it was still there.
Her toothbrush remained in the holder for longer than it should have. I didn’t throw it away immediately. Not out of sentimentality. I simply forgot. When I noticed it a week later, the bristles bent inward, slightly frayed. That bothered me. I replaced my own toothbrush instead. There were decisions to be made that felt disproportionate to their importance. What to do with her coats. Whether to cancel a streaming subscription she never used. Which side of the closet should become mine. These questions occupied more mental space than her absence ever did. I resented them for it. They demanded answers without offering meaning in return.
At work, I became obsessed with efficiency. Meetings irritated me more than usual. I interrupted people mid-sentence. I rewrote emails that were already adequate. Once, I spent nearly an hour adjusting the margins on a document no one would read closely. The symmetry mattered. I needed things to align, if only on a page.
Someone mentioned her name in passing; not hers, but someone else’s wife with the same name and I corrected them unnecessarily. The room went quiet. I hadn’t meant to make a point. I just couldn’t tolerate imprecision.
At night, she returned.
Not always visibly. Sometimes it was just her voice, pointing things out. Sometimes it was a smell; her shampoo, faint but unmistakable. Once, I woke convinced she had been crying in the bathroom. I listened for several minutes before realizing the sound was the pipes.
“You’re avoiding it,” she said, standing behind me as I stared into the mirror.
“Avoiding what?”
“Me.”
“I see you all the time.”
“That’s not the same.”
She leaned against the doorframe, watching me with the same expression she used to wear when I pretended not to hear her.
“You’re cataloguing,” she continued. “You always do that when you don’t want to feel something.”
I wanted to argue, but the truth is I had been keeping mental lists. Things that still worked. Things that didn’t. Things I would eventually have to replace. The car needed servicing. The kitchen sink drained slowly. The smoke detector chirped once at 3:12 a.m. and then never again. I wrote that down.
I found her wedding ring in the drawer where she kept spare change and receipts. That annoyed me. We had agreed it would go in the jewelry box. I picked it up, turned it over in my hand, and noticed a small scratch on the inside of the band. I didn’t remember it being there. I wondered how it happened and I wondered when. I didn’t cry. But I couldn’t stop thinking about the scratch.
At the grocery store, I reached for items out of habit. Her cereal. The brand of tea she preferred. I put them back; it seemed inefficient to buy food no one would eat. I stood in the aisle longer than necessary, comparing prices on identical products, irritated by the illusion of choice. A child cried somewhere behind me. The sound was vaguely excessive.
There were moments; brief, inconvenient moments; when the grief tried to surface properly. They arrived without warning, like nausea. A photograph. A voicemail I hadn’t deleted. The realization that no one else knew the particular way she took her coffee. I felt it then, sharp and immediate. And just as quickly, I shut it down by focusing on something else. The angle of the frame. The background noise. The battery percentage on my phone. This seemed preferable to surrendering.
I began to suspect that grief, like belief, was an act of participation. You had to lean into it. Accept its terms. Allow it to disrupt you. And I wasn’t ready to do that. I had responsibilities. A schedule. A life that, infuriatingly, continued to require my attention.
One night, she stood very close to me. Close enough that I thought I might feel her warmth.
“When are you going to look at it directly?” she asked.
“At what?”
“At the fact that I’m not coming back.”
I looked past her, at the wall, at the crack I had started to hate.
“Probably when it becomes useful,” I said.
She laughed then; not kindly.
“You always did misunderstand usefulness.”
After that, she stopped appearing so clearly. Or perhaps I stopped noticing. The difference seemed academic. The apartment grew quieter. Not emptier; quieter. As if something had been turned down rather than removed. I continued to live in it, to occupy space, to correct small errors wherever I found them. I became very good at focusing on the wrong things. And in doing so, I managed, impressively, to survive. I stopped correcting things after a while. Not consciously. It just happened. The crack in the wall remained. The flickering light continued to hesitate before coming alive. The smoke detector chirped again one night, exactly once, at the same minute as before. I didn’t write it down this time. Instead, I waited.
I began sleeping with the bedroom door open. This wasn’t intentional either. I told myself it was for airflow, or habit, or because closing doors felt unnecessary now. Still, I noticed I slept better when the hallway was visible. When the dark had somewhere to arrange itself.
She didn’t speak anymore, but she was present. I could tell by the way the air felt occupied. By the pressure in the room when I entered, as though something had adjusted itself to make space for me. Once, half-asleep, I apologized to the emptiness for being late. The word slipped out naturally, without thought.
“You don’t have to explain,” came the response.
I sat up so fast my vision blurred.
The room was empty.
I told myself that grief does this. That the mind, when deprived of ritual and release, manufactures continuity. Still, I stopped leaving lights on at night. I began to notice small changes. Objects shifted slightly from where I’d left them. Nothing dramatic. A chair angled inward. A book placed spine-down instead of up. The bathroom mirror wiped clean of the streak I’d ignored for weeks. I assumed I’d done it myself and forgotten. This explanation satisfied me more than the alternatives. One morning, I found two mugs drying on the rack and I stared at them longer than was reasonable. Perhaps I had washed one the night before and simply didn’t remember. Memory, after all, degrades under stress. Neuroscience supported this. There were studies. I drank my coffee cold, standing at the counter, refusing to sit at the table.
That night, I dreamt of her clearly for the first time.
She was lying in bed beside me, facing away, breathing evenly.
“Emi,” I said.
She didn’t turn around.
“You stayed,” she replied.
I woke with the word lodged in my chest.
After that, the apartment began to feel less like a place I lived in and more like a place that was learning me. The floorboards creaked selectively. The refrigerator hummed only when I was in the kitchen. I stopped listening to music. Silence felt more appropriate. Like courtesy. I started leaving notes for myself. Reminders. Instructions. Turn off the stove. Lock the door. Take the trash out. Sometimes, the handwriting wasn’t mine.
The letters were too careful. Too rounded. I told myself I was tired. One evening, as I prepared for bed, I found the bedroom door closed. I was certain I’d left it open.
I stood there for several seconds, hand on the knob, listening. There was no sound from inside. No movement. Just the sense; unmistakable now that the room was occupied.
“I don’t like it when you shut me out,” she said softly from the other side.
I did not open the door. Instead, I slept on the couch that night.
The next morning, the bed was made. Hospital corners, just the way she liked them.
I considered calling someone then. A friend. A professional. But the thought of explaining this, of translating it into symptoms and narratives, felt exhausting. Besides, nothing bad was happening. Nothing violent. Nothing I could point to and say, this is wrong.
She was simply present.
Grief, I decided, was not loud because it wanted attention. It was quiet because it intended to stay.
Weeks passed. Maybe months. Time had become unreliable. I stopped checking the calendar. The outside world felt increasingly theoretical. Emails piled up unanswered. I stopped going to work. No one came to check on me, or if they did, I didn’t hear them.
One night, as I lay half-awake, I felt the mattress dip beside me.
The weight was familiar.
“You don’t have to pretend anymore,” she whispered.
I didn’t ask what she meant.
“You kept waiting for it to end,” she continued. “But this is what it looks like when it doesn’t.”
I turned toward her.
She was not as I remembered.
Not wrong, just incomplete. Like a thought interrupted before it could finish forming. Her face held the suggestion of features rather than the certainty of them. Her eyes reflected light without containing it.
“I took care of things while you were gone,” I said, because it seemed important that she know.
“I know,” she replied. “You always focus on the wrong details.”
She reached for my hand.
Her touch was cold, but not unpleasant.
In the morning, I woke alone.
The apartment was silent.
On the kitchen counter lay a note I hadn’t written.
You don’t have to keep waiting.
I don’t leave the apartment much now. There’s no need. Everything I require is here. At night, I sometimes hear her moving through the rooms, adjusting things, fixing what I missed. I let her. It feels fair.
Occasionally, I catch my reflection in the mirror and don’t recognize it immediately. The delay doesn’t frighten me. It feels appropriate, like something is finally aligning.
Grief, I’ve learned, isn’t something you overcome.
It’s something that learns how to live with you.
And sometimes, if you let it stay long enough, it learns how to live instead of you.
