Penguin.com (usa)

I sit here on my lunch break several times a week, and always at least once at weekends. If it starts raining, I get out a plastic raincoat that folds away into a little purse. It's hideously ugly; I found it in my mother's chest of drawers.

There are lots of us with raincoats like that, in the cemetery.

I always sit here for at least an hour. Presumably in the hope of getting down to the right sort of grieving if I stick at it long enough. I'd feel better if I could feel worse, you might say. If I could sit here wringing out endless hankies without stealing constant glances at myself to check the tears were genuine.

The awful truth is, half the time, all I feel is furious with him. Bloody deserter, why couldn't you watch where you were going? And my feelings the rest of the time are, I suppose, pretty much like those of a child who had a parakeet for twelve years and then it died. There, I've said it.

I miss the constant companionship and all our daily routines. There's no one rustling the paper on the sofa beside me; no smell of coffee when I come home; the shoe rack looks like a tree in winter without all Örjan's boots and wellies.

And if I can't work out the answer to "Sun god, two letters," I have to guess it, or leave it blank.

One half of the double bed's always neat.

Nobody'd worry where I'd got to if I didn't come home because I happened to have been run over by a car.

And nobody flushes the toilet if I'm not there.

So here I am, sitting in the cemetery, missing the sound of the flush. Weird enough for you, Stephen?

There's something about cemeteries that always makes me think of some convulsive, second-rate stand-up comedian. Repression and gabbled strings of words, of course—but surely I can allow myself that? I haven't much besides my little repressions to occupy me these days.

With Örjan, at least I knew who I was. We defined each other; after all, that's what relationships between two people are for.

Who am I now?

I'm at the mercy of whoever happens to see me. For some I'm a voter, for others a pedestrian, a wage earner, a consumer of culture, a human resource, or a property owner.

Or just a collection of split ends, leaking sanitary napkins, and dry skin.

Though of course I can still use Örjan for defining myself. He can do me that one, posthumous favor. If Örjanhadn't existed, I could be calling myself a "single girl, thirty something"; I saw that in a newspaper yesterday, and it made my hair stand on end. Instead, I'm a "young, childless widow," so tragic, so very sad. Well, thanks for that, Örjan!

View the reading group guide and a Q&A with Katrina Mazetti »