It’s been almost seventeen months since Don died.

The last text I sent him (which is still on my phone) was about the full moon coming up on December 12, 2019. He didn’t respond, because he was already gone.

This week was the eighteenth full moon, the eighteenth cycle of grief.

There is one box of perfume left to sell. And a small plastic tote. And the three bottles on the desk. And I think there are two strays on the kitchen table. A friend asked me how many bottles were left to sell, I felt my chest tighten. There is a spreadsheet, but I don’t want to look at it.

After months of working in the hospital through the worst of COVID, and making regular efforts to sell all of the perfumes, I told myself that I needed a break. I consolidated everything and didn’t look at it for several weeks. Eventually, I felt guilty and went “shopping” in the box myself so that I could still send Don’s wife a check. It was the holidays, I wanted her to have the money.

After that, I put the box on the floor by my desk, where it would be an obstacle. I told myself that I was going to just power through to the end. But every time I picked up the box, it felt like it weighed a thousand pounds. I would put it back down and take out one bottle, promising myself that I would try again tomorrow.

Most of the time, “tomorrow” I would come home from work and go straight to bed.

Why is this so hard? It’s not even letting go of the perfumes anymore that’s the struggle, it’s the actual effort involved in the process. Every interaction that I have with the perfumes feels like strenuous physical and emotional work. It exhausts me. Every time I handle them and rearrange them and photograph them and discuss them with other people, I’ve paid an additional energetic price. And then, when some things aren’t sold and I have to pack them back up…. it can feel overwhelming.

Most of the people in my “real life” never knew I had a friend who died, because I had been sick in bed for so long that my real life had ceased to exist. We knew some people in common online, and they were a great comfort to me, as were other virtual friends and strangers. But within weeks of Don’s death and me riding to Chicago half-dead in a snowstorm to pick up his perfume collection, the pandemic started, and things just kept happening to everyone, and I’ve never had a chance to process anything. I’ve just held it. I’ve held everything — the pain, the shame, the secrets, the self-loathing, the crippling fear, and the perfume.

It hasn’t even felt real most of the time. I’ve told myself that he picked a good time to leave, because, my God, he would have hated every bit of this whole pandemic thing. He would have been really, exceptionally, bad at it too. I can actually smile about it a lot of the time; during all of this suffering, how lucky he is to have escaped just in time! But it’s really just starting to sink in that, when all of this is over, things aren’t going to be the same. He’s not going to be there.

The past few days I’ve been wearing too much of Don’s Monsieur Carven and Chanel Pour Monsieur. Once in a while, a tear slips down, but mostly I’m a desert now, all dried up, cracked open and bare. There have been too many things to cry over; I’m wrung out.

Since Don has been gone, everything else around me has fallen apart. Sometimes I think maybe he was the weird glue that held my fragile life together, the strong breeze that kept my shitstorm in the air. Deep down, I know that really he was a hurricane, and my low tides were always just hidden within his giant swells.

My lemon tree lost all of its leaves except for one. And then, suddenly, it just produced all of these buds anyway, which are turning to blossoms. Right now, I feel a lot like this lemon tree. I sat and looked at it and inhaled its beautiful scent for a long time today. I am the lemon tree. I have one leaf. I still have a lot of beauty still inside me that wants to come out, but so very little to nourish it. I will keep growing, because that’s what trees do. Today, I sold some of Don’s perfumes. Tomorrow I have to do the same, again and again, until they all have new homes, so that I can finally start doing more of what I need to do for myself.