I’m 73 years old, and since my wife passed away eight months ago, the house has felt unbearably quiet.
We never had children. It was always just the two of us—forty-three years of shared mornings, shared worries, shared laughter. She used to say the house remembered our voices even when we weren’t speaking. Now, it remembers only mine.
Most days, I keep the TV on just to hear something other than my own thoughts.
That Thursday, I drove to Walmart to buy groceries. Nothing special—milk, bread, soup, the same things I’ve bought every week since she died. As I pushed the cart back toward my car, the wind cut through the parking lot like a blade. It stung my face, numbed my fingers.
