I have my friends and a good support system in place for myself, but it isn’t the same. I miss my partner. I miss discussing our day over supper. I miss sharing what’s on my mind and working out issues and coming up with solutions. I miss making plans together, even if it’s just what to eat the next night. I miss the cozy intimacy of being with someone who just gets you.

I remember Mom and I having a conversation after my dad died. She said what she missed the most was having someone to share her thoughts and feelings. Sure, she had friends and her children, but we couldn’t fill the role that Daddy left. He was her person.

I’m sliding into that same circumstance. Only my dad died – gone from our lives,. Jim is still here. Somehow, that just seems to make it worse. It’s like a constant cruel tease – he is still there but you can’t have him anymore.

Jim is still able to make jokes and we have a lot of laughter in our home but we don’t converse. There is no longer a back and forth conversation where each sentence builds on the one before. Jim needs to steer conversations to a place where he feels comfortable. So, he changes subjects to tales from his childhood and when his own children were small. I can no longer share things from my childhood because he quickly changes the subject back to him. Not to be rude or self-centered but because it’s his coping mechanism. If he’s speaking, he can avoid the embarrassment of forgetting  or not understanding what anyone else is saying so he ends up monopolizing conversations.

I can tell him simple things like how much traffic was on my commute. He asks me about work every day but even that has a limitation to avoid triggering a meltdown. Many of his memories, especially work related ones, have been rewritten in his brain and they’ve become negatively charged and cause him to get angry at his version of situations. So I try to avoid mentioning work at all.

Filtering what I say is exhausting. It’s worse than trying to tame my potty-mouth around my mother (sorry Mom), it’s constant task of vetting my words and I never know what’s going to trigger a venting session.

We all want to be heard and I truly don’t know what I’d ever do without my support system of friends and family, but it just can’t take the place of your partner.