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“Doesn’t the house feel too empty at night?”
I smile.
Not because I don’t understand their worry, but because they haven’t lived long enough to know one simple truth: living alone doesn’t mean being alone in the world.
My name is Margaret, I’m 79 years old, and I live in my own home. It’s a colonial on a quiet street that used to be filled with noise, speed, screen doors slamming, and laughter echoing down the hallway. There were Thanksgiving dinners where we all talked over each other, little feet running across the hardwood floors, toys abandoned under the coffee table, and nights where we ate lukewarm casserole because everyone got home from practice or work at different times.
And there were also those nights I didn’t sleep. Not because of a sad movie, no. But because of life. Because of the bills, the worries, the mental math you do in the dark, the things you don’t say so you don’t add more weight to someone else’s shoulders. I’ve been through the comfortable years and the years where we had to tighten our belts. I’ve known love, yes, but I’ve also known exhaustion.
I was a wife. I was a mother. I was that woman who holds everything together, quietly, behind the scenes. The one who remembered the dental appointments, the refills for the prescriptions, the grocery lists, the birthdays, the logistics to keep the machine running. I lived for others for a long time. A very long time.
Then, my husband passed away.Get updates on the latest posts and more from Tatticle straight to your inbox.It’s not an easy sentence to say. It drops like a stone in water. It ripples, over and over. After the funeral, after the neighbors stopped bringing food, the silence scared me. A silence that wasn’t just in the rooms, but in my own heart, which was so used to beating in time with someone else’s presence.
