forstevenwithlove.com

For Steven, my husband, my confidant, my home.

Before the world knew me as a woman who lost her husband, I was a girl who found her person.

And before I understood what it meant to spend a lifetime loving someone, I was simply Victoriana, standing at the beginning of a story I thought we would have forever to finish.

Almost fifteen years.

Sometimes I try to understand that number. Almost fifteen years of waking up in a world where you existed somewhere in it. Almost fifteen years of knowing that no matter what happened outside our door, there was one person who knew the language of my heart without needing me to translate.

Almost fifteen years of becoming Victoriana and Steven.

I didn’t know we were building an identity. I thought we were just falling in love, growing up, figuring things out as we went. I thought we were making a home, raising children, collecting stories, and doing all the ordinary things people do when they believe tomorrow belongs to them.

I didn’t realize that somewhere along the way, you had become the place inside the world where I could finally put my guard down.

You were never just the man I married.

You were the person I brought my thoughts to before they had even finished forming. The one I wanted to tell when something made me laugh, when something upset me, when I couldn’t understand why the world was the way it was. You were my witness to the little things no one else would remember and the big things no one else could understand quite the same way.

We had minds that traveled similar roads. Sometimes I would begin a sentence, and you already knew where it was going. Sometimes all it took was a look. We had our own way of seeing things, our own humor, our own history, our own little world that didn’t need explaining to anybody standing outside it.

I never understood the need to fill every empty chair with another person when I had you sitting beside me.

I had my husband.

I had the family we grew from two young people who still had so much growing to do.

I had our children, their voices filling the house, their little lives unfolding before us. I had you beside me in the middle of all that beautiful chaos, and I thought, This is it. This is the life.

We were learning adulthood while raising five little people who depended on us to know what we were doing. We didn’t always know. We made mistakes. We changed. We had to grow up in ways we couldn’t have imagined when our story began.

But we were growing together.

And that mattered to me more than perfection ever could.

I loved watching us become the people our children needed. I loved that our family was something we had made, something that carried pieces of both of us into the future. I loved that when I looked at our babies, I wasn’t looking at them alone. I was looking at the life we had created together.

There was a particular kind of peace in that.

The peace of knowing that someone else remembered the beginning.

Someone else knew what it took to get here.

Someone else could look at our children and see not only who they were becoming, but all the years, all the laughter, all the hard days, all the little miracles that had brought them into our arms.

You knew the story because you were in it.

And I never imagined there would come a day when I would be the only one of us left to tell it.

Now I walk through the house, and grief has turned ordinary objects into a language I never wanted to learn.

Your favorite bowl.

The tortilla roller.

Your clothes, still carrying the shape of a life that was interrupted before I was ready to let it go.

Your glasses, with those little scratches across the lenses. I used to see them as something that needed cleaning. Now I think about how many times I looked at your face through them without ever imagining I would one day ache to see those scratches again.

I remember finding your clothes for you. Getting your multivitamins together. Doing the little things that made up the quiet architecture of our days.

I never knew how much love could hide inside a routine.

I never knew that one day I would want to return to the very things I sometimes did without thinking, because at least then you were here to need them.

I would give anything to stand in that ordinary moment again.

I would gather your clothes. I would find your vitamins. I would hand you the things you always reached for. I would watch you move through our home, unaware that I was living inside a memory I would spend the rest of my life trying to touch.

I would do every small, unremarkable thing a thousand times over.

Because the truth is, Steven, I never wanted a remarkable life without you.

I wanted our ordinary one.

I wanted the mountains and the drives and the music. I wanted the nights we stayed up binge-watching a series, promising ourselves we would go to bed after one more episode. I wanted the conversations that wandered nowhere and somehow ended up everywhere. I wanted the sound of you in the next room. I wanted the comfort of knowing I could call your name and hear an answer.

I wanted more time to grow old beside the person who had grown up with me.

I wanted to meet the older versions of us.

I wanted to watch the years soften the edges of our younger selves. I wanted to see what our children would become and watch you discover the kind of father they would still need when they were no longer little enough to climb into your lap. I wanted more birthdays, more photographs, more stories that began with, “Remember when we…”

I wanted a future that had not yet learned how to say your name in the past tense.

But the world changed, and it did not ask me whether I was ready.

Now music feels like a room full of doors, and every one of them opens into you. I hear a song, and somewhere inside it I find a version of us I wasn’t prepared to meet. So sometimes I leave the music off, because silence is hard enough without a melody reminding me of everything I can no longer reach.

I am learning that grief is not always the sound of crying.

Sometimes grief is standing in the kitchen, looking at a bowl.

Sometimes it is seeing a pair of glasses in your mind so clearly that, for one terrible second, you almost believe you can turn and find them on your face.

Sometimes it is wanting to tell your husband something funny and remembering halfway through the thought that there is nowhere to send it.

Sometimes grief is being surrounded by the children you love more than your own life and still feeling the loneliness of being the only parent in the room who remembers what it was like when their father was here.

Because I miss you as their father, too.

I miss sharing the weight and wonder of raising them. I miss knowing that when something happened, I could turn to you and say, “Can you believe our kid just did that?” I miss the way we belonged to the same story, the way our children were the living proof that our love had reached beyond the two of us and become something with its own heartbeat.

Our family is still here.

Our love is still written into their lives.

But I miss the man who stood beside me while we made it.

And I miss the woman I was when you were standing there.

That is the part I struggle to explain.

I am still Victoriana. I know that. My name has not disappeared. My heart is still beating. My children still need me, and morning still arrives with all its ordinary demands.

But I do not know how to be only the person I was before you became part of everything.

I was Victoriana and Steven.

I was the girl who became your wife, the woman who grew alongside you, the mother who built a family with you, the person who could bring you a thought without rehearsing it first.

I knew where I belonged.

And now the world keeps asking me to step forward into a life I never agreed to imagine without you.

People may tell me I will find myself again. Perhaps, one day, I will discover pieces of myself I cannot see through the grief right now. Perhaps life will teach me how to carry this love differently.

But I need the world to understand something.

I am not grieving because I cannot appreciate the life I still have.

I am grieving because I loved the life we had.

I am not asking to forget how to stand on my own.

I am mourning the person with whom I never wanted to have to learn.

I do not want to erase myself. I want the life in which I recognized myself. I want the home that had your footsteps in it. I want the marriage that gave my ordinary days their familiar shape. I want the future we were still growing toward, the one I thought we would enter together, carrying the history of our younger selves like an old photograph tucked into a wallet.

I want my confidant.

I want my best friend.

I want the man who accepted me as I was, who never required me to become someone else to earn my place beside him.

With you, I did not have to wonder if I belonged.

I belonged in the passenger seat. I belonged in our kitchen. I belonged beside you at night, praying to God with the person I loved. I belonged in the life we had built, with all its imperfections and unfinished corners.

I belonged to a love that had seen me grow.

And I thought I would get to keep growing there.

Sometimes I imagine telling you all of this. I imagine sitting beside you, trying to find the words, and you listening the way you always did when something mattered to me. I imagine the conversation wandering, as ours always did, until we were talking about something completely different.

I would give anything for that ordinary ending.

For a night that concluded without becoming a memory.

For a conversation that did not have to end with me imagining your answer.

For one more moment in which I could forget that the life I want is no longer the life I can reach.

I want you to know that I am trying, Steven.

I am trying to raise our babies while carrying the weight of missing their father. I am trying to live in the house where so much of you remains. I am trying to understand a grief that changes its shape every day. I am trying to make room for tomorrow without feeling as though I am leaving you behind.

Some days I can do it.

Some days all I can do is miss you.

And perhaps that is enough for now.

Perhaps I do not have to know who I am becoming while I am still learning how to live with the absence of the person who knew who I was.

Perhaps I can be your wife and a grieving woman and a mother trying her best, all at once.

Perhaps love does not ask me to stop reaching for you just because I cannot hold your hand.

Because if there is one thing I know, it is that you were never merely a chapter in my life.

You were there while I was becoming.

You were part of the way I learned to love, to build, to forgive, to grow. You were the person with whom I made a family, and the person who helped make the world feel familiar enough for me to call it home.

You were my witness.

You were my person.

You were my Steven.

And I miss you with a grief that has no proper measure, because there is no number for the ways a life can be woven into another life. There is no calendar that can tell me when I should stop looking for you in the ordinary places. There is no word that can hold the feeling of being loved so completely by someone whose absence has changed the shape of everything.

So I will keep telling our story.

I will tell it through the little things you left behind, through the children who carry pieces of you, through the memories that hurt because they mattered, and through the love that still rises in me even when I do not know where to put it.

I will remember the young people we were, the adults we were becoming, and the family we built before we understood how precious every ordinary day could be.

I remember you at thirteen, exactly how you looked when we met. I remember you at fifteen and sixteen. I remember the boy you were, Steven, and I miss you more than words can say.

I will remember that I was loved by you.

I will remember that we grew together.

I will remember that, for almost fifteen years, I had a person beside me who made the world feel less lonely.

And when I can no longer explain what I miss, when the words fail and the house is quiet and the night stretches longer than I know how to bear, I will return to the simplest truth I have.

I loved you.

I love you.

I will love you in every version of the story that remains.

I wish I could have grown old with you. I wish we had been given the years we imagined. I wish I could look across the room and find you there, wearing your scratched glasses, living another ordinary day with me.

But if I cannot have the rest of our story the way we planned it, I will carry the pages we were given.

I will carry our children.

I will carry our memories.

I will carry the girl who became your wife, the woman who grew up beside you, and the love that made us Victoriana and Steven.

I do not know what tomorrow will ask of me.

I only know that you were my home in this world, and I miss you more than I could ever teach these words to say.

I miss you, my husband.

I miss you, my confidant.

I miss you, my best friend.

I miss the world we made when we were two.

And if love could bring you back, even for one ordinary afternoon, I would not ask for anything extraordinary.

I would only ask to sit beside you, hear your voice, and be your wife again.

P.S. I love you.