There is a very specific and underreported condition that occurs when your mate dies. And no one prepares you for it because Hallmark prefers its grief with soft lighting and a violin soundtrack. In reality, what happens is this: your brain refuses to update the system. It continues to operate as though your person is alive, nearby, and quietly evaluating your daily to-dos from an undisclosed location in the kitchen.
I recently grew some tomatoes. Successfully. This is notable because I have historically treated plants like short-term houseguests—welcome, briefly admired, and then mysteriously or, perhaps inevitably, gone. But this time, I did it. I started the little baby plant in December and kept it alive in the warmth of my kitchen until it was ready for the porch.
Now, in the warm Texas spring, I have a huge bag of golf-ball-sized tomatoes in my freezer awaiting their brethren to ripen so I can make some amazing sauce or have my frontier-woman canning day. I even had that moment where you hold one in your hand and think, Look at me, participating in agriculture. The irony of “well, doofus, that’s what nature does… it grows” in my head and me realizing generations of people have been doing this successfully for thousands of years, is still not enough to wipe away the pride of growing edible objects on my porch.
And then, without warning, my brain did what it has done approximately 60 times a day since he died—it reached for him.
Not just literally when I’m sniffing the rack of golf shirts in the closet. Not metaphorically. Logistically.
Rick needs to see this. I have been doing this to please and delight him for three years and I finally had a huge success.
Which is tricky, because Rick is in heaven, presumably not concerned with produce, and definitely not available for real-time feedback on whether I overwatered. But my mind? My mind has him standing right behind me, smiling, while I relish his home-grown-is-so-much-better-than-grocery-store grin.
This is what no one tells you. Grief is not just missing someone. Grief is discovering your entire internal operating system was built with another person as a primary user, and now the account is… inactive, but still somehow resident on many tabs running in the background.
It’s like a phantom limb, except instead of a missing arm, it’s a missing audience. A missing witness. A missing person to say, “Yes, that mattered,” or, occasionally, “Why are you doing it like that?”
And the worst part is—not the sadness—it’s the constant, ridiculous, deeply human impulse to keep that person on the email thread of your life.
CC: Rick
Subject: Tomatoes
Status: Still impressive, please advise.
Before anyone sends me a strongly worded email accusing me of turning grief into material, let me assure you: Poppy is fully aware that many of you are carrying losses, some may be far heavier than tomatoes and golf shirts. Some of you are missing spouses. Parents. Children. Friends. Some of you are grieving people who are still alive but no longer reachable in the ways that mattered most.
This is not Poppy making light of grief.
This is Poppy doing what she has always done—standing in the middle of ordinary human life, noticing the strange little corners of it, and saying, “Well… nobody warned me about this part.”
Because grief, it turns out, is not always dramatic weeping beside a rain-streaked window while a cello plays softly in the distance. Sometimes it is standing in your kitchen holding a perfectly respectable tomato and realizing your brain still wants approval from a man who, according to my son, is either doing carpentry with Noah or having tea with Jesus and therefore no longer available for produce consultation.
And somehow, absurdly, heartbreakingly… both things can exist at the same time.