It was a gruesome, traumatic death, making 18 months seem like ten years--and that was just how *I* felt. I've seen things I would never tell anybody. I think battle-trained detainees would have sold nuclear codes after a month of how she died. At the end she seemed possessed by the illness, puppeted by it. It used her voice to croak and call and spit fury. I could almost see it as her flesh melted away over months--that pointed shape that hunched inside her, sated with a little more of her body every day.

With her incredibly rare form of an incredibly rare illness, we were able to communicate for a while with the doctor who put a name to the disorder himself; it was from him and several colleagues at Mayo that we got word we'd hit the wall. It might be a showy death that took her, an aneurysm or embolism, the brain or the heart--or it might be the slow death that had climbed her limbs to her torso, dry-rotting her skin and fat and muscle, turning her bones to barren honeycomb so they broke under one step. In the end, it was both.

I'd used the last of my vacation days and all of my money to come a few months before, hoping to bring her back home. I wasn't at the specialty hospital in that other state, holding her hand and counting the heartbeats, taking advantage of a few lucid hours to tell her exactly how much she meant to me, how wrong my world was without her, that she was part of me and I didn't know how to be half of us. I had to risk answering a phone call at work and quickly gabbled out our agreed-upon reply in response to a question about extreme measures of resuscitation--if there was no hope, I said, she didn't want the machines or the zapper or the tubes. When I got home, I turned my phone back on to hear a phrase familiar from the deaths of other family and friends: change in condition. 

"She bought it" doesn't play well on voicemail.

I came here because I don't know what to do. Everything in my life is falling apart before my eyes. I don't even have a home or a car.  Because she was sure she'd get well, no will got committed to paper. Now her relatives are selling off everything she loved. I have no claim because, to keep from being crushed by her medical bills and to protect her from my below-average credit, we never married (though I have a certificate I never filed, witnessed by two kind nurses). They promised to send me some ashes--I bought a pendant with a small compartment to hold them--but it's been a month and I haven't seen them. They promised I could write the obit and set up a memorial to promote awareness and treatment of her disorder, since rare diseases get so little attention, but then I found out they just cremated her and put in a single line notice.

I'm trying to get up the energy to start a gofundme or something anyway, but I can't help but feel abandoned by the only people in the world who loved her like family, who remembered what she was like every year of her life. I want those people to share my grief and instead, I cry on a schedule, when no one can see or hear and get in my business about it. I want to yell at work that none of this crap matters, it's so meaningless, I didn't even get any time off to sit in a park on a hill and look down at the willows and up at the paintbrush clouds, or to go to that restaurant in Montreal we both wanted to savor on our honeymoon. I had too few chances to wash and brush her beautiful hair. I had to stop kissing her when she got sick because she got resistant infections from her wounds and they never went away; she was always in isolation and because of my parents' cancer I didn't want to risk bringing anything back.

We took pictures of our rings and sent them to each other when she had to be away at Mayo. It was our way of saying "I still do".

I can't be over this in a month. I'm just starting to feel it and everyone around me wants me to be moving on. Moving where? I'm in the dark in a rowboat and nobody's got the other oar. We'd planned a business. We'd named our future cat. We had a wedding binder. We did cake tastings. We met while writing interactive fiction online and never quite got out of the habit; my head is a field of dead characters and cauterized plotlines. It should be an absurd, OTT image, but to me it's not. It's like everyone heard the final trump and fell where they stood, every one of them wounded like she was.

I'm alone. I feel so alone.