My Great Fear

Death has never been one that I am too familiar with. I have never lost anyone close to me... except my grandmother, and I was only five or so at the time. She lived far away, so her direct influence in my life was little if any- although I do remember locking myself in the bathroom to cry when she died. Either than that one brief and somewhat shallow memory, I have been blessed to never have felt the tear of a loved one being ripped away by that unseen and unstoppable force.

What life and death handed me, imagination stepped up and did it's work. I do not often fantasize about death, nor do I fear it. I do, however, fear, like a child fears the nonexistent terrors of the dark, losing the one I dreamed of growing old with.

Recently one of my professors mentioned the idea that losing a loved one is like losing a limb. At first it's absence is clear, stark, and painful. Yet as time applies it's healing properties, we learn to live and cope with the absence. I can't help but wonder, how can one learn to live, as only half of a whole? How can a heart continue to beat as only half of a heart? I fear- although unmarried and uncommitted- to lose a love during my youth.

I hear stories of mothers, perhaps only in their late thirties and forties, losing their husbands unexpectedly. I ask myself, how do they go on? What about the other half of their life that they will never spend with the object of their adoration? What about the support they must go on living without? What about the life they had begun building together? It's an idea my mind surely can't grasp, yet makes my heart tremble.

I imagine what I would feel. What would hurt the most, I think... that side of the bed that was once warm in the mornings after he got up for work. It would be cold now- a constant reminder of the missing half of me.