Four months, already

" I don't know how you do it," the woman coming toward me in the grocery aisle said. I had greeted her with a smile and a hello as we angled our carts out of each other's way. I don't know her name, but she knows mine. She is one of the bank tellers at the Machias Savings Bank. We chit-chat when I see her every week or two, but I've never actually told her all about Frank and me. But she knows my story, as I suspect hundreds of other local people know, too. From the first day of the awful, terminal diagnosis, we made a decision to be very public about how we would deal with it.

"It's four months tomorrow (meaning, since he died on January 17)," I tell her. "And I don't know how I'm doing it, either."

I really don't. I have no answer for "how you do it." You just go through the day, one moment at a time. You get from one meal to the next, one meeting to the next, one message to the next. When the day is done, you're relieved, because you got through it without a meltdown or a crisis. If such a thing were either public or private it wouldn't make a difference. One would be as hard to cope with, as the other.

You don't have a choice in doing any of this. You just make up your days as they go, hoping not to get too unbalanced. You hope you are pulled together enough to be in others' company.

If today marks four months since the evening I held him as he died, I can't say it feels any better than it did at the three-month, or two-month, or one-month point. The day Frank died is as vivid as ever. And I hope it stays that way.