All of the nagging question

Next week I’m going to turn 30. And I’m trying to figure out why it’s bothering me so. It’s not like. . . all consuming, the world is ending, I’m past my prime, etc. It’s more just like a nagging, and continues to nag the closer that I get to it. It’s just a number. But I know that a lot of my problem lies in just knowing that I did not imagine my life would be this at 30.

 I’ve never been one to think concretely in things like five or ten year plans. I think the best example of that is the fact that I only auditioned for one music school for undergrad and basically had no back-up plan if I hadn’t made it in. Really I think it’s one question that haunts me. It was one thing that for whatever reason I made into a concrete “thing” and now it’s sticking out of the grief rock and into my gut.

 “What if I’m a widower before I’m 30?”

 It’s been echoing louder and louder. . . and I am not sure why I put that number on it. It could have easily been 40. Or 50. Or 72 1/2. Why put some kind of specific end gate? I don’t know. What are you supposed to think when your fiancée gets a diagnosis of the return a 5 year dormant cancer that suddenly presents in a rare and odd way?

It was a conversation we had. . . a conversation that never really completed, because how can that conversation get completed? It’s a dialogue that only one person can really end up carrying out in the end. I know that she gave some specific tasks to specific people, and I know that some of those have been completed. But to go back to the question, I think that in my mind, even in my darkest dreams, I don’t think I really believed that she would die. Not so soon anyway. Not before our first anniversary. By the time I would be 30, we’d have had a few years together. Celebrated some milestones. Continued to fight the invisible assassin.

 Now I’m three and a half years into a new normal that doesn’t look like anything I would have even guessed. And certainly, it is not bad. There is a lot of good things, a lot of amazing people, and continually I am in awe of God’s perfect plan many of the details. But that doesn’t mean I don’t grieve the life that didn’t happen.


 I don’t really have a point, except to say that I miss my wife.