19,030

366 days.

I shared 17,569 days of marriage with Susan. I loved her for 18,664 days before her death.

But sometimes the past 366 days seemed longer than the 17,569 or the 18,664.

I was never alone until Susan's death on July 22, 2019. I moved from my parents' house to my and Susan's house on June 15th, 1971. We spent occasional days apart when she or I attended conventions alone (usually because one of us had to stay with the cats we always spoiled), but the total number of days we spent away from one another during our 48 year marriage was less than a dozen.

"You weren't meant to be alone," Susan said to me once when she was contemplating a doctor's prediction that she had less than a year to live due to a chronic, debilitating illness (she proved him wrong by living for seven years beyond that—and even then, it was not that illness that took her from me).

I was certain she was wrong. I tried to prove her wrong. I failed, because she knew me better than I knew myself.

My therapist asked me, "Could you live the rest of your life without love?" I told her no. Thankfully, I never had to—I had the love of friends who saw me through my bleakest moments,  who shared my pain and sorrow.

Those friends led me to rediscover something I had said many years ago and have repeated often since then: every day, no matter how heartbreaking or painful, contains a nugget of joy in it. On the day that Susan died, Brett and Allison and Charles took me to El Rodeo for lunch because I hadn't eaten in over thirty hours. They reminisced with me of happier times when Susan was healthy, and those memories made me smile. Even on that day, friends helped me discover a nugget of joy.

I have experienced and endured all those somber firsts without her—the first birthday, first Halloween, the first Thanksgiving, the first Christmas, the first New Year's, the first Valentine's Day, the first anniversary,

With the help of others, I have learned that I can be alone. I have learned that I can like myself. And I have learned that I can love and can be loved. And I have learned that life can surprise me. I learned all of that in the past year.

366 days. But that's not the most important number.

19,030 days—that's how long I have loved Susan, as of today. And that number increases by one every time another midnight arrives. That's the most important number.