Learning to Live With Half a Heart

The silence is paralyzing for Judy Smiley. It’s suffocating. 

 

Her home used to be full of her family’s idle chatter and belly laughter. Now, she resides in an empty house, where she goes to sleep alone, wakes up alone, and eats alone. Nothing prepared her for the silence echoing loudly throughout her house. 

 

Nor had she experienced loneliness. She’d never been alone. Now, only silence and isolation provided any companionship.

 

Pat Smiley passed away on December 26, 2017, from Lymphoma. For the first time since the age of 14, Judy had to live without the other half of her heart. They met in junior high, with Judy instantly enamoured with Pat’s independent, carefree nature and the way he ran with an older crowd. They fell in love over the course of one day – their first date. 

 

At Lake Texoma on a warm Saturday afternoon, they spent countless hours swimming, laughing, and hoping the day would never end. They talked about everything and nothing while the day drifted by. As the sunset painted the sky and cool evening air hung between Judy and Pat, they begrudgingly left the lake. 

 

And yet, they just couldn’t seem to let the date end, so the lovestruck pair went home to change before meeting up again for dinner. At midnight, they didn’t turn back into pumpkins. Within a few dates, Pat suggested they get married. 

 

Instead, the middle schoolers dated six years before getting married and eventually having two daughters, Leslie and Amy. Their union lasted 54 years, days spent on the lake wakeboarding, weeks whiled away trekking across the country in their camper, years bridged trying to best each other in different sports. They bickered about Pat’s constant refusal to ever call in a repairman and laughed about their children’s antics.   

 

Then, Pat was diagnosed with Lymphoma, and for 27 years, Judy lived in denial about it. Although he lived in and out of hospitals, he always came back out, ready to work in their garden or go fishing again. Nurses gave Judy sympathetic warnings about how much time her spouse he left, but he always came back.

 

Until he didn’t. 

 

Even after the funeral, Judy still grasped on to that denial, latching on to the way it seemed to dull her pain for just a moment. When everybody left and the fake smiles and strong fronts slipped off the faces of the Smiley family, Judy found herself telling her daughters she felt ready for Pat to come home. Now, sitting alone in an empty and quiet house, the truth is harsh, ragged, and impossible to ignore.  

 

She goes to the cemetery a lot. Judy and her daughters always make sure to lay nice flowers on his grave and put up special decorations for holidays. In a way, this brings her some level of peace — being near him and taking care of him in this way. While she can’t cook for him or clean with him, she can make sure Pat’s grave is always decorated with nice flowers, holiday decorations, and an OU flag that would make him smile. 

 

Judy also finds herself clinging to their memories — living for them. She frequently thinks about the way he would purposely misuse English and speak in grammatically incorrect ways to make their daughters laugh. She used to hate it because she didn’t want their girls to start talking like that, but now she thinks about it with fond laughter and a wistful smile. 

 

Although, not all memories serve as a place of solace for Judy. She moved out of their home because she saw Pat everywhere in their space. She felt him in every piece of furniture they picked out together, the backyard that he spent countless days working to make perfect, and all the rooms that held the echoes of thousands of moments between the two. Everything reminded her of the loss of her soulmate. 

 

Judy and Pat were madly in love, and everybody knew it. For 60 years, they were each other’s whole world. Losing Pat was unlike anything she had ever experienced — it sucked all the air out of her lungs and shredded her sense of self. The loss is consuming and debilitating. She’s moving through life with half a heart, half a soul, half of herself. 

 

As the days continue to drudge by, Judy keeps on. Everyday, she struggles with the silence and the loneliness, and she doesn’t know if that will ever get better. While her daughters and granddaughters call and visit frequently, they eventually leave or hang up and the quiet returns. At the beginning of every day, she wakes up in an empty bed, with nobody there to greet her in the morning like Pat used to. 

 

The kind of love Pat and Judy had was passionate and transcendent, and there is no recovering from the loss of that type of love. Judy doesn’t know what the future looks like for her, but she does know that without Pat, she will never be whole again.