Echoes

Now she is gone I will have to do it all myself.  No more sharing a morning cup of tea with her, no more of her smile, no more warmth in the bed beside me.  I just don’t know how I will cope, --- I really don’t.

It was the night after her funeral that I arrived home alone for the first time.  I had stayed away at my daughters since she passed; a place busy with children and the likes of thirty something problems and anecdotes, not like the ones I have faced of late or now for that matter, and my grandchildren, well they are in an age that’s cleared the evening streets of laughter and filled bedrooms with complex gadgetry that only young minds can understand.

The ones who have visited of late, with their crock pot meals and sympathetic smiles, they feel it the moment they cross my threshold, the emptiness--- my house stale like a hollowed out carcass.  And now when I speak the rooms echo, --- oddly I don’t recall such an effect when she was here, her flesh seemed to absorb and soothe my every curse and cusp.   

In the evening as I rest in my old lounge chair there are times I hear her busy, but as I wake half drunken from my slumber there’s nothing but silence.  Oh how I miss her voice, her smell upon the air...  How I miss her.