Member-only story
The Empty Chair
Learning to Live with Loneliness After Grief
The silence is what hits you first. The absence of those small sounds that made up the soundtrack of your shared life — the rustle of his newspaper, the clink of his coffee cup, the soft whisper of his breathing beside me at night. After being together for years, I never knew silence could be so deafening.
Loneliness comes in waves. It crashes over you in the grocery store when you reach for his favorite cereal and remember there’s no one to eat it. It sneaks up in the evening when there’s no one to tell about your day. It haunts you at 3 AM when the house feels too big and the world feels too empty.
The well-meaning suggestions come quickly. “Get a pet,” they say. “Join a club. Volunteer. Keep busy.” As if loneliness is a problem to be solved rather than a void to be navigated. They don’t understand that it’s not about filling time — it’s about learning to exist in a world that suddenly has a person-shaped hole in it.
The hardest part isn’t the big moments — the holidays, the anniversaries, the birthdays. It’s the small, ordinary minutes that catch you off guard. Setting the table for one. Cooking meals that aren’t his favorites. Watching TV shows without pausing to explain the plot. The casual cruelty of muscle memory, still reaching for his hand in crowds.
