My husband has been dead now for three years. My life feels good. I’m comfortable with who I am. I date, I socialize, I host small dinners, I dance. I don’t feel injured all the time, like I did for a long time after his death.

The shifts in my grief during the third year have been subtle. While the first two years felt like they were full of upheaval and big tasks—going through the garage, learning how to be a homeowner, getting comfortable being the only human in the house—the third year has felt quieter.

A lot hasn’t changed in the third year. My husband’s picture is still on the lock screen of my phone and I still have some photos of him around the house. I still chant for his wellbeing. I see my therapist once every three weeks, and I attend a support group meeting every month or so.  

Moving forward in the third year hasn’t looked dramatic. At two years out, I posted about still not being able to camp or raft and not being ready to part with my husband’s sock collection. I haven’t camped or rafted yet but doing a grief float is still on my radar. I have started giving away his socks to people who knew him.

Grief is familiar now, which makes it easier to tolerate, but it is no less intense or real. I don’t miss my husband any less or love him any less. It’s possible I love him even more. More time to reflect has meant more time to miss him and appreciate what he brought to my life. Writing this blog and memoir pieces keeps me in touch with my pain.

The saying that time heals is not true for me. Time has made the grief more familiar and comfortable but not less. Or perhaps I misunderstood what people meant when they told me, “It will get easier.” I thought they meant the pain would go away. I never believed them, having learned from my mother’s death 43 years ago that losing someone you love is a forever pain, but I hoped my suspicions were built on cynicism.

There are still rough days, but even the rough days are easier to tolerate than they used to be. A rough day doesn’t last a full day any more—it’s more like a rough half day lately. I still have the gut-wrenching full body sobs from time to time, but generally, I can function with my grief in the background. Again, not because there’s less of it or it’s less powerful, but because I am used to it now. I’ve learned how to function with it in the background and that feels normal to me now.

The biggest change for me in year three has been dreaming about him. For the first two years, I hardly ever dreamt about him, but in the third year, I have dreamt about him often. It’s always the post-stroke Tom in my dreams.

I have a lot of dreams where he’s walking. Very slowly, but he’s walking. In my dreams, I’m usually living my current life and he’s there, walking slowly toward me or with me. In my dreams, we’ve gone to street fairs, held hands on the beach, traveled to Europe and Africa, relaxed in hammocks together. In my dreams we dance together, him using a walker or standing nearly still while I shimmy around him. In my dreams, he’s disabled but there’s no pain and no drug haze. He’s always happy and at peace.

Sometimes I’m not sure if something is a dream or a sleepy memory. Often after I’ve put fresh sheets on the bed, he shows up in a dream snuggling into bed with a little sigh of satisfaction, just like he did in life. He pesters me to make him fried chicken and German chocolate cake. The dream Tom is exactly as he was in life.

I wake up from the dreams feeling happy and connected to him. Those dreams are the biggest gift of the third year.