Nine Months In: Widow In The Morning
Nine months after losing my husband, I wake mid-movement to kiss him and crash into the reality of widowhood. A stark account of morning, grief and survival.
I woke, eyes still shut, already leaning in.
The soft light of early morning. That gentle, particular warmth of two people just waking, the world still unheard, the day far from asking anything of either of us. A halo of it. Unhurried. Complete.
Everything safe, held. Everything enough.
The small, ordinary bend toward him that has lived in my neurone for decades. Lips already moving towards his head – his temple, his cheekbone, his chin, the soft corner of his mouth. The back of his head with the cutest soft curls at the nape of his neck, warm from sleep. Every angle I know. Every landing place memorised in my movements.
My hands reaching to lightly lever myself against his shoulder, his chest, the solid warmth of him. The landing always came so quickly – his warmth, his solidity, the sweet familiar weight of him.
My fingers take just moment too long. A beat. A breath a little lengthened.
And then they land.
On cotton.
Cool and fresh and utterly wrong. The duvet, indifferent, soft, where his body should be.
In the same breath my mind is busy scanning resolution.
Casual. Domestic. even mild irritation. Where is he.
Call the eldest. He might have left a message with her.
Check the phone, he’d have left a message – or on a piece of handwritten note somewhere in the house.
I am still leaning forward. All the above happening in quick fire succession,
Something cold slices through.
He is dead.
Everything halts.
This kiss still queued in my muscles.
The phone call still half-assembled in my head. Both of the thoughts hanging there for a split second – like they can land somewhere.
There is nowhere to land.
He is dead.
No. there is no need to call our eldest. There is no ‘where is he’.
There is no logistics problem to be solved.
There is only the fact that I was mid-kiss for the man I have loved for thirty-odd years, who no longer exists in this room.
Then.
A singularity.
Less than a nano-second.
Less than a blip.
The entire felt-world – the warmth, the safety, the halo. the him – collapsed inward.
Gone.
Erasure.
And I, still half-leaning, with. some thirty-years of love and nowhere – nowhere – for it to land.
This is nine months in.
People say I am strong. Formidable, a friend say. And they mean it kindly.
They see me upright, functioning, focused on the administrations, moving through the world.
I cried in the shower this morning.
The water loud enough to cover sobs. Formidable women need to grieve without witnesses.
Strength and devastation living in the same body.
Layer upon layer of it, shifting, contradicting, held together by no more than the next breath.
Some mornings arrive flat. Unhurried. Tousled, bleary, hands rubbing sleep from eyes. He is dead.
The mind already there, already knowing. Let’s get up then.
And the mind argues back. What’s the fucking point.
The Saturnian part answers. Feet to the floor.
You can do this.
Sometimes it takes multiple attempts.
Sometimes the body acquiesces on the third cajole, the third quiet insistence.
Sometimes it does.
Other morning I stay. In the bed. In the sobs, in the physical heaviness of a woman who knows her entire world has collapsed and that she is alone in the rubble and that the clearing of it – all of it – falls to her.
No timeline.
No help expected.
No one looking this way.
Just me. Onwards.
And some days, onwards is enough of a reason.
Other days the reason is denser, more absolute – our daughters.
This remaining parent, upright and coherent and capable and functional.
Just for them. Just that.
It is enough.
It has to be.
Grief lives in the spine, in the shoulder, in the automatic reach of a body that loved someone for decades.
It exits in flux of peaks and troughs and does not flatten. Does not plateau. Does not simplify.
It ambushes and subsides, with waves of it returning unexpectedly.
We do this. those who have loved this long, this deep.
We wake into the halo and we find it gone and we carry the day anyway.
And if you are reading this from your own morning –
You are here.
That is everything.
If you wake each morning and feel something slam through you before you have even opened your eyes — there are words for that.
The body remembering a life that no longer exists in the room. Muscle memory still moving toward a person. Love with no landing place.
If you are crashing daily into the absence of the one who was your safety, your witness, your ordinary companion — that is attachment still searching. The nervous system still reaching for a body it knew for years, for decades, as home.
It lives in the motor neurons. In the vascular memory of a body that learned another body over decades. In the cellular architecture of a life that was shared. Encoded at a level that language barely reaches.
You wake into a life that used to be shared and is now singular. That is the shock of it. It lives deeper than thought. Deeper than memory. In the motor neurons, in the blood, in the cellular architecture of a body that spent decades learning another. That knowledge stays, and outlives them – it was built into the body over decades.
It still hurts because it was real.
The grief, after all, is commensurate to the love.
Notes on the pictures here
The main picture:
Charcoal, crayon, soft pastel colourings. February 2026, Nusye McComish.
This is broken down in the sketches charcoals and crayons; followed later by the soft pastels colours.
Lost.
That is the only word for it. And so my hand moves when my mouth cannot.
His face above mine. Both of us young. Both of us still there on the page, in the urgent lines of a February night when being lost was the whole of it.
Grief reaches backward and finds him alive.
I let it.
Colour returns. Red behind him. The freshers’ ball — his vest and bowtie, the only one he owned, worn with complete conviction. My mother’s fuchsia gown, borrowed, barely considered.
I could draw him with confidence. I knew exactly how he felt in a room.
Placing myself in the picture was harder. It always was.
I found the photographs after he died. In the loft. Looked at the young woman standing next to him and finally saw what he had always seen.
He never once looked like he was waiting for someone better.
I know that now.
Wedding Picture:
Black and white. Profile. Last century.
Four years of courting before this — four years of knowing — and still his smile comes down to meet mine as if he cannot quite believe his luck.
His tails and cravat. My face tilting toward him. Hands held.
This is The Day. The one everything before was moving toward, and everything after would carry.
I didn’t know yet the full weight of what we were sealing.
I just knew it was him.
Please Don’t Go. I Love You So.
A figure dissolving into light. Already turning away, leaving the frame.
This is the moment his consciousness left the house. Not the death — that was earlier, and different, and its own unbearable country. This is the other leaving. The quieter one. When the air changed and I knew he was no longer in the rooms with me.
At the bottom of the picture, in my own hand. as opposed to typed or well-composed.
Written.
Please don’t go. I love you so.
Still true.
Always true.
I am still very much in love with him.
May the seeding in the creative world bear fruit in strengthening communities.
Your chameleonic artist, widow, sometimes-writer in – dare I say it – hope
Nusye
A note :
This writing is a private act that has become visible. I write primarily for me. It documents conditions as they are lived. Its purpose is continuity. Any resonance it finds in others are akin to winds moving through a building — real, but incidental to the structure.
Eleven Months In: A Widow’s Poem and Autoethnographic Note – Writing Grief From Inside The Data
Eleven Months In: A Widow’s Poem and Autoethnographic Note — Writing Grief From Inside the Data. A printmaker and widow documents her second poem eleven months after her husband’s death. Written and revised in April 2026, this autoethnographic accompaniment note records the body’s timelagged update — the hands that grip, the abdomen that curls, the 400 thread count cotton that holds temperature for one. No retrospective wisdom. Zero resolution. Primary-source grief, written from inside the data. Published by Nusye McComish – SouthSeaEyes Printmaker. Thursday 2nd April 2026
Nine Months In
Personal essay of grief writing about waking into loss. For those in traumatic bereavement who find the body remembers before the mind catches up.
First Winter
Field notes from traumatic bereavement: documenting grief’s administrative violence, temporal mechanisms, and survival at 8-9 months post-loss.
Grief on the Body: Embodied Loss and Creative Practice as Record
This essay documents grief as a lived bodily state and considers creative practice not as recovery or remedy, but as record: work made alongside life, under altered conditions.
First Christmas
When your husband was Christmas, you inherit the Turkey Problem. Navigating the first Christmas bereaved – the unfathomable grief, the planning, picking up broken pieces.
