Pain. Lots of pain.

A few days ago was one of the worst days I've had since Hillary died.

There was no good reason. I slept reasonably well. I woke up when my alarm went off. I hit the snooze button.

The first conscious thought I had that after that was that Hillary wasn't in my bed because she was dead. Isaac had come in sometime during the night, but really, I was alone.

My brain then immediately went back to our morning routine of the before cancer time. Hillary would get up a bit before me. She'd have a shower, then get her bike gear on to commute to work. She'd do all of that quietly so as not to wake me. I usually woke up.

Hillary would head downstairs to get breakfast and make her lunch for the day and I'd usually follow her down at this point. Stumble around until I made my coffee and then we'd have 10-15 minutes of just being around each other before I needed to start working on kids lunches and the like.

Then Hillary would head off to work. Sometimes the kids would be up by then, sometimes not.

November 2015, about 7:00 AM. I never understood the helmet cover approach for rain management. She claimed it helped.

That day though, and never again would she get up before me and go downstairs to get ready for the day. Again, this was also a routine that ended with the cancer, so it had been a while.

My next thought, if you could call it that, was just a deep existential void.

I went downstairs and cried while my coffee brewed.

My brain busily fed me statistics all day. "It's probably been 8 weeks since you cuddled anyone that wasn't in a hospital bed. 7 weeks since you were actually cuddled back."

"Half of your entire life with Hillary had diapers in it."

And so on.

The whole day was just pain and on riding that edge of grief all day. Crashing down one side or the other repeatedly.