What I've Learned from My Husband's Death

On that cold December day, I stood in the chilly, dark morgue perplexed as to what my husband’s body was doing within the coffin. I was certain that he was too confined in that cramped, uncomfortable box.

Clean-shaven, his short gray hair neatly combed. He looked dashing in his favorite blue shirt with no tie, even if he was somewhat pale.

I couldn't grasp it. Dead? He was alive yesterday, and now he's dead?

Yesterday, I had a strange feeling in the early morning—as if something horrible were about to happen.

The sunrise was obscured by too much cloudiness. The birds cackled in a weird way and it was raining.

The foul weather had seeped into my foggy mind, making me feel as though I'm drowning in a boggy creek with murky water.

I could not shake off that odd feeling that we were all about to experience a calamity. Only, I couldn’t imagine what that could be.

Unable to sleep, I got up and went to the fridge for some water. That’s when I saw a ghostly figure in front of me wearing white clothing.

It took me a few seconds to realize it was my own reflection in the mirror. "Is it true?" I thought. "Do I really look like that?"

The sight in the mirror was shocking. My face was pallid, sagged beneath my eyes with deep purple bags, simply horrific. My forehead was slick with sweat, and the air around me felt thick and heavy as if a thirty-pound weight was pressing down on my shoulders.

While gazing into my own eyes in the mirror, I noticed a dark shadow standing behind me – a black, elongated silhouette.

"How strange," I thought when I recognized that it was my own husband who stood there silently, clad in his black PJs, looking tired. Before I spoke, he, without saying anything, walked right through the mirror as if it wasn't there.

The image was so vivid that I could have sworn it wasn't my imagination.

I was frightened, of course, but at the same time, I wanted to run after him and... I couldn’t move.

So I turned around and looked at our bed, where I would expect my husband to be, and it was EMPTY. The bed linen looked untouched and smooth - as though he had never been there, a thick layer of dust had settled on the pillow where his head would have been resting. CRAZY!

I stood in my thin nightgown with goosebumps rising on my skin. “What is going on?” I looked back at the mirror, nothing there, then back at the bed... and there he was: my husband, on his side of the bed, soundly asleep.

"Thank you, God!" I went back to bed, hugged him, relieved.

In a few hours, when I woke up, he was dead. It was a heart attack, an instant death, the coroner said.

, . .

"Goodbye, my love," I walked over to the coffin, bent over, and kissed his pale cold cheekbone. I thought of strange things like how he always caressed the back of my neck with the very tips of his long fingers and how much I loved that.

The coffin was nailed shut before my eyes. It was the last time I saw him.

, . .

Afterward, for years, I was plagued with the same sense of dread that I felt on that awful day. That feeling was always followed by a throbbing headache and a sensation of me drowning in a body of dirty water.

No doctor could help me to get rid of this heavy darkness inside of me. Then, one day, I suddenly grabbed one of his old shirts and sniffed it. I still could smell his aftershave, which I loved so much. It was still there.

I put that shirt on and wore it everywhere. His fragrance relaxed me. It was as if I could feel his presence when I wore that shirt, as if I brought back some of his soul with me, which had been wandering somewhere restless during those past years.

I never had another nightmare or headache.