The month after my husband Daniel died at forty-two felt like living inside a world made of smoke. Everything around me looked familiar — the furniture, the photos on the wall, the patterns of sunlight across the floor — yet everything felt changed, unreachable, altered in a way I couldn’t name.

Grief distorts reality in slow, disorienting ways. Days lost their structure, and nights refused to give rest. I woke each morning with a heaviness that seemed carved into my bones, reaching instinctively toward the empty half of the bed, as though muscle memory hadn’t yet accepted what my mind already knew. His toothbrush still stood beside mine, bristles frayed. His coffee mug still waited by the sink, stained the way only he could tolerate. And his phone remained on the nightstand, exactly where he left it before the heart attack that took him so suddenly. I couldn’t bring myself to move it. Somehow, it felt like the last tangible thread connecting us.