It's been hard since you died, sweetie. The world has become alien to me, a spring without birds, a burnt-out forest, a black-and -white planet. The days are silent and the nights full of whispers. Ever since the funeral, I have talked about you with anybody who would listen, but I can't keep on doing that. People have been kind, they have hugged me, cried with me, given me food. They have their own dead, though, and now they are willing to let you go, to let your image bleach out like an old photograph. But I will never let you go, sweetie, I will talk to myself to keep you alive, I will give you a new home, we will be happy.
I give myself wondrously clever arguments to prove that in some essential sense you haven't really left me, you didn't really die. I'm good at that kind of thing, I always could make myself feel better with spurious logic, it's my training, I reason as needed.
My current pretense is that Life is Mind and that your mind has been transferred to me. I have evidence for that, I don't just hand myself a line, I know you're inside me.
If I close my eyes, I can see you, hear you, know what you're going to do next. You live behind my eyes, in the folds of my brain, in the web of my neurons. I tease you, argue with you, you smile, we go shopping , make love, sleep in each other's arms., you are with me still, you didn't really die, you just changed homes, you moved in with me, we are together again, nothing essential has changed.
That's what I tell myself, sweetie. It's a fine delusion, better than angels, better than being with Jesus, almost better than life. It's got the ring of science and the reach of dreams. It gets me by most of the time.
But when I wake up, I don't smell your hair, I don't feel the curve of your body, don't touch the silk of your night gown, don't hear your soft breathing. My real eyes don't see you, and the eyes of my mind are still closed. My delusion machine is not yet running, and the Empire of Grief is on the attack. My computer has hung up on me, my energy shields are down, the warriors of Memory are here, their weapons reduce me to sadness, I am melting in my tears.
I will do better, sweetie. I will wake up with the birds, I will go out to your garden, touch your flowers, whisper your name. I will have you in my mind always, my life will not be a sad haiku, I will not be like the samurai who, in the darkness of the bedroom, steps on his dead wife's comb.