A Woman Writes to Her Husband, Thirty Days After His Suicide

In the End, There Is Only Room for Love | Poorna Bell

It has been nearly 30 days since you held the spark of your life between your hands and pressed them shut. Since then, I have been trying to make sense of the world. In Hinduism - a religion you wholeheartedly set about getting to know even though I had long lost my faith - we have an 11-day ceremony and a 30-day ceremony. I've never understood what these were for. But perhaps they are to mark a set of realisations. By 11 days, I was aware that your death had made me a different person. Everything looked, smelled and tasted different. People that I had known for years now seemed like strangers in the midst of what I felt, and what I thought they could not possibly know about. I saw you in everything. I saw you in the sea, imagining you in the shift, turn and swirl of water. I saw you at your graveside, in the freesias you so loved. I saw you in the birds you had encyclopaedic knowledge about, in the double rainbows that lit the sky the day we said goodbye to you. You were a big, Kiwi man in real life, and yet I saw you in the most delicate of things.

From an essay by Poorna Bell, for her husband: