The week after the funeral was when I enacted my plan of establishing routine. It allowed me to focus on tasks versus emotion and to maintain whatever facade I had established. But when it comes to tasks and plans, there’s no way to manage every aspect of your day. There are things you have control over; the actual routine moments of the day: waking up, getting ready, the preparation and eating of food, what time you leave for kindergarten, when you start work.

Then there are so many other moments that can’t be planned; the time between tasks—those moments when thought occurs, and if you’re not careful, you’re thinking about her, but there’s also moments between those moments where darkness begins to seep into those thoughts.

I began thinking about all the What-Ifs. What if we just hadn’t tried the right trial and the next one would have been it? What if she had gone to the doctor sooner? What if we had waited another year before having kids and we would have known about the cancer, decided not to have kids, and now Eleanor wouldn’t be growing up without a mother because she wouldn’t exist right now.

The one thought that permeates all other thoughts is the idea of being with her again. What if I could be with her again? The priest, during the funeral, while invoking the intercessions talked about that time when we’d be joined together in heaven. It sounds good, but it doesn’t really matter if you aren’t sure what you believe. I know that it was meant to be a comfort, but it wasn’t. It became something that I began obsessing over in those moments between moments when the darkness came.

What if?

What if I could be with her again?

After I dropped Eleanor off at kindergarten and started the drive back home, the darkness would seep in while I was sitting at the stoplight. I would feel it pushing down on my chest. That would be the first indication. There wouldn’t necessarily be a thought, because, I truly think, that I was so disconnected from the idea of thought or feeling at this point. It would arrive and its presence would be the reminder that I should feel something.

I was never any good with feelings. When I was younger, I was a kaleidoscope of emotions full of bubbling, vibrant energy. But at some point, it was too much, and on a particularly vibrant, bubbly day my mother told me to stop being so crazy or she’d put me on Ritalin. So I did, I shut down that energy and bottled it up and didn’t let it escape. Soon that youthful, positive energy was replaced with moody adolescence which remained bottled up except for the occasional emotion filled outburst. It fueled my introversion and developed into a lack of emotional awareness in social situations, which led to some poor decision making in high school and college, as well as a limited circle of friends.

From those experiences, a pattern began to emerge: feelings would be bottled up until there was a breaking point and then things would explode.

Shortly after we were married, I landed my first management role. I was young, there was no training, and suddenly I was responsible for people. All that stress would be bottled up between nine and five, and as soon as I got home it would explode out of me. I wouldn’t ask how Veronica’s day was. I would just talk for an hour about my awful, stressful day.

I quickly realized that I needed an outlet, or my destructive nature would compound until it exploded.

So I took up running. The stress would build up between nine and five, but after work I would go running and let my brain reset, working out all the stresses and issues that occurred during that day. It worked and it was a routine that I kept until Veronica started getting really sick.

I can feel the darkness creeping in.

“Hello,” I whisper to it.

“You’re getting fat,” the darkness says and I know it’s right. I can feel the waistband of my pants digging into the fat around my belly. If Veronica was still around she would say that she loves me the way I am, but she isn’t, so I agree with the darkness.

The light turns green and as the car moves forward, I’m stuck thinking about my eventual demise.

What if I let go of the steering wheel and let the wheels drift over the line and over the edge of the shoulder? What if I sped up and drove into those orange barrels as fast as my not-so-fast car could go?

The car would flip.

I would veer into oncoming traffic.

And I would be with Veronica again.

But a part of me knows what would also happen if I drove through those barrels. The car might not flip. I probably wouldn’t land in oncoming traffic and if I did, who would hit me? Would it be a mother in a minivan? What impact would my actions have?

My memory drifts to an old memory.

I was out celebrating with several college friends. Driving home with one of my roommates, we pulled off onto an exit ramp. It was almost midnight. There weren’t a lot of cars on the road, but lying in the middle of the road was a body. I didn’t see it until the last second as the headlights illuminated the body just in front of us. I jerked the car around it and quickly pulled off onto the shoulder. It was then that I saw several other cars parked on the shoulder just ahead of us, but no one had ventured out to check on the body.

That particular area of the city was dark—not a lot of light pollution—and the exit ramp we took was also an on ramp for another highway, so cars were still going fast.

I got out of the car and walked down the shoulder towards the body. Before I could get too close a police car pulled up and blocked the exit ramp, lights flashing. The officer yelled at me to get back.

Between the illumination of the flashing lights and the headlights of passing cars, I could see the body. It was twisted unnaturally, the right leg positioned in a way that made it look like those cartoonish sidewalk chalk drawings in TV police procedurals. There was no chance that person was still alive.

As we waited for more officers to arrive, my old roommate and I stayed with some of the other onlookers. A girl, a teenager, who didn’t see the body in time and ran over it was a complete mess.

I think about the impact my accident would have on the witnesses. A child looking out the window of a passing vehicle. A little girl, Eleanor, just over five, without a father.

I don’t want to be responsible for that.

But the darkness persists. “What if you could be with her?”