I am going through that experience. My wife of 67 years died just over a year ago of leukemia, and I still cannot reconcile myself to her loss. She was a beautiful and intelligent woman with a sweet temperament and a lovely smile, and we were more than husband and wife. We were friends, companions, lovers–as close as two human beings could be.

It all began one hot summer night in 1934 when Ruby and I met for the first time at a dance in Manhattan. We fell in love right away. We were married one year later. It was the height of the Depression. Ruby had a job, I didn’t. But many couples in those days were getting married with that unconventional arrangement–the wife went to work while the husband stayed home to do the housework.

Fortunately, it did not take too long before I found a job, and we were able to move out of our furnished room into an apartment. We had two children, first Charles, then Adraenne. We bought a house in a suburb of Queens, and the years sped by swiftly. The children grew up, went to college, got married, and we were alone together again, just as much in love as we had ever been.

In our 60s we both retired from our jobs, sold the house and bought a new one in a retirement community in New Jersey. We made new friends. We were active physically and socially, both in the best of health. It seemed then as if life could go on forever, and it felt that way all through our 70s and 80s, and even into our 90s. But suddenly it all came to an end. Ruby was diagnosed with leukemia, and after a few months of useless treatments, she had to be rushed to a hospital one morning.

Ten days later she died. I was in the room with her when it happened, and I will never forget that terrible moment. I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t want to believe it. I went to the bed and held her in my arms and wept. I couldn’t let go of her.

And I still haven’t let go. The closets and dresser drawers are still filled with her clothing, her shoes, her purses, her jewelry. Her toothbrush is still in the bathroom. A book she was reading before she went into the hospital is still on the table in the living room, open to the page where she left off. She is with me all the time. I hear her voice. I see that lovely oval face of hers with those big brown eyes and that dark hair that never grew fully gray even when she was in her 90s, and that perennial smile of hers. And when I take a walk I can still feel her soft hand in mine.

How does one let go of all that? How does one cope? At Mount Sinai Hospital, where Ruby died, there is a palliative-care program that counsels you on coping. Among the suggestions they give are to be with others, to talk about your loss, to share your feelings with those who have suffered the same thing. I have tried them all, and they don’t work for me. My sorrow is just too deep. I have the additional support of my son and daughter, both of whom are caring and insist on my staying with them as often as possible. But sooner or later I must come home to a house that is silent and empty, with all the reminders of Ruby surrounding me.

For a younger man going through all this, there could be some solution in remarriage. But I am 93, and there is no possibility of romance’s coming to my rescue. I have never lived alone in all my life. Before my marriage I lived with my parents. I know nothing about cooking or taking care of a house. I must confess that there have been times when I wished I could join Ruby, and have given serious thought to ways and means of doing it.

But one thing has saved me from that. It was a remark that my daughter made to me. Perhaps seeing the depressed state I was in, and speaking for her brother as well, she said, “Dad, you have lost a wife. But we have lost a mother, and you are the only one left to us, and we need you.”

Until then I had not realized that I was not alone in my grief. They felt it as strongly as I did, and I did not realize how important or how necessary I was to them. It gave me the incentive to live and perhaps even to weather this thing out.

Recently, I took some of Ruby’s clothes out of an overcrowded closet and gave them to a charitable organization. My appetite, which had all but disappeared, is slowly returning. This may be the start… of what? Coping? Forgetting? This last I will never do. There are the words of Helen Keller that express the way I feel:

“What we once enjoyed and deeply loved we can never lose, for all that we love deeply becomes part of us.”