Mirror Image

After washing the makeup off of my face in preparation for my night’s sleep, I stood staring at my reflection in the mirror. It occurred to me that I no longer know who I am looking at or who is looking back at me.

Even though I center myself in front of the mirror, what I see reflecting back at me is my own reflection off to the right of the mirror’s frame and Chris’s reflection next to mine. For the past year, I have seen my reflection this way, but I only just realized it tonight.

When I study my own image in the mirror, I don’t know what to make of the woman I see staring into my eyes. I see her auburn hair and her brown eyes but I don’t fully recognize her. She’s incomplete. I see Chris’s wife looking at me, Chris’s happy wife, except that she is no longer happy and she is full of worry.

I hate the mirror, it’s reflections and it’s way with telling truths I’d rather not know.

I don’t know who I am if I’m not Chris’s wife. I’m not done becoming who I’m supposed to be after I’m Chris’s wife. There is a work in progress in my bathroom mirror.

For now, I am without an identity. Who am I? Chris’s widow? Carol’s friend? Teri’s sister? The singer? The girl that buy’s coffee at the Someday? These are all pieces of me but they have been blown apart by the impact of illness and death. I am not together and I am not sure that I will be ever again. I exist every day with the feeling that a crucial part of me is missing. Empty. Gone. Because I still have not completely processed that truth, the realization hits me like a ton of bricks every time I am faced with the truth of my situation, that I am not with my husband anymore.

Time continues to march on. Chris died a long time ago. At this point, he has been dead for as long as he had cancer.

I have been dead that long, too.

I think that’s what I have been seeing in the mirror, my own dead self and a shadow of the woman who considered herself to be lucky to have met and married a man who was a perfect match for her.

Someday I will join him again, just as I promised him.