I’m approaching another milestone - as if I needed another one.
Soon it will be 1,000 days. I’ve been one thousand days a widow.
It sounds like a long time. And it is. But I was married for a much longer time. 33 years, which is by my calculations just over 12,000 days.
We had 12,000 days together. Now 1,000 apart. And the thing that strikes me is that time is so relative. And in many ways it is meaningless.
The week before your birthday, when you are about to turn five, can seem like eons, while the actual day itself encompasses an instant.
We measure things - our life - in days or weeks or years. In time. But what is time, really? Better put, perhaps time isn’t anything consequential. It is what we make of it.
Oh, sure, it gives us benchmarks, but what does it mean to be seven years old, or 29, or 42 or 83? Does it matter if you go to bed before midnight or wake up by 8:00 am? Eat lunch promptly at noon or dinner right after the Wheel? Is your first day at work more important than the last or any of the ones somewhere in the middle?
What makes an afternoon at the beach better than an afternoon cleaning the garage? How can a week of vacation seem spacious on day one, but shorter than a long weekend on day seven?
The moment my children were born, I’d trade each of them for months - years even - of mundane existence.
Those moments in time for me were more valuable than almost all the others.
So it goes with love. My love left this earth one thousand days ago; that’s 24,000 hours and more than a million minutes. Since then, I’ve contemplated life and death and love more than in the 12,000 days I had as his wife, or in the 20,000 that I’ve had in this life.
In that, I’ve thought about lost time, wasted time and all the time I took for granted. I’m pretty sure there were many wasted moments or hours or even days. It doesn’t make me a bad person. It makes me human. It makes me like the rest of us.
A horrific loss, I think, often forces you to contemplate time, and purpose and the absolute truth of things. The same comes, in some regard, with age. As you see time gradually ticking by it takes on more meaning. In the last 1,000 days, I’ve wondered what life is really about. I’ve thought about my purpose and my distinct need now to find it and pursue it - for me, but just as much for him. For both of us. I’ve thought about love and life and how fleeting it all really is.
Fleeting, and in many ways meaningless. How time very well may be a construct invented by us to try to make sense of things. So we can appreciate birthdays and anniversaries and holidays. So it can provide a framework to this story we call life.
For now, it is a construct I live with. That I live within. Like it or not.
And today is a milestone in time’s construct. It is day 1,000 a widow.
I’ve made it this far. I’m still marking time, counting the days we’ve been apart. Because as they grow in number - as they widen the gap between then and now, so then lessens the gap between now and then - the time we will be together again.
And I fully believe that will happen. Until it does, I’m going to make every day here count. You can count on that.
Jill Pertler is an award-winning syndicated columnist, published playwright and author. Don’t miss a slice; follow the Slices of Life page on Facebook.
