Photographs by Susan Rosenberg Jones.

Charles - 48 years together, 15 months after: "The first thing that was unexpectedly, profoundly, upsetting - our older daughter, Rebecca, was going to take Hope's jewellery box home to put jewellery in and I was 'fine, fine take that.' But, after she left, I panicked, because I suddenly realized I didn't want her to take it.  I was so relieved to see that it was still there, on top of the dresser, on Hope's side of the bed.
I hadn't thought about it, but every night when I lay down to sleep, I face her way, looking at it."

Denise - 26 years together, 15 years after:” He had oesophageal cancer and we knew almost immediately that it couldn't be cured. Then he lived for a year and a half. He died two weeks after the doctor told him to look into hospice. He never went to hospice, but he did die in the hospital.                                  
I have strong feelings of regret sometimes; they're more petty regrets. And probably my biggest regret is the day the doctor said that it's time to consider hospice. We went out and we sat down in the waiting room, and he started to weep, and I was all kind of, ‘Oh, we'll do this, and we'll do that’. You know, I can't even remember, but like, ‘We'll look at this, we'll try’. And I just have always regretted that. I simply didn't sit with him in that moment and let him just grieve what he had now been told. His uncle who was much, much older died a couple years ago and his son spoke at his funeral. He said, I never saw my father cry except the day they told him he was going to die. So again, I just wish I had been less reassuring and more present. I think the things that trigger strong feelings are often regret-sins of omission kind of things.”

John - 32 years together, 15 months after: "I have always been seen as a strong person but never thought I would ever need therapy until I got it. You know, with a Black family, therapy is not high on the list of priorities, but a Black family needs therapy as much as anybody else."

Kathleen -39 years together, 5 years after: "There are things that sort of force you to deal with it. My dog has died since, but I still had a dog then and you got to get up and walk them no matter what. I will say I'm probably a little bit worse since the dog died because I can sleep crazy hours and I've always been a night person.
One thing people don't talk about is the way sometimes it's easier. I think you don't necessarily want to admit about yourself, but sometimes when I'm padding about, at three o'clock in the morning, I think I don't have to be quiet. I can make as much noise as I want to, I can get up out of bed and do something, if I feel like it. Not everything is awful all the time."

Katy - 37 years together, 9 years after: "I think I lost myself a lot in the relationship. I lost my confidence and my ability to love myself. I had one of those battered women type mentalities then. I felt I wasn't good enough. I wasn't battered physically, but mentally, it's just as bad.
The hurt of him alive hurting me was a different type of hurt...now that he's gone, I'm going to go through that hurting and it's going to be done. I won’t have to learn to just manage it and I won’t have to live it every day over and over. His sister actually said, now you're free.
The relationship was bad. And it was strange because it wasn't until he actually died that I started remembering the things that we did that were good. I couldn't even remember those things until he was gone, and I had time to say, oh, remember when we did this? That was so much fun.
After therapy, as a coping mechanism, I started baking.  One night, I couldn't sleep, so at 10:30pm, I started baking. I baked all night.  I baked cakes, biscuits, pancakes, garlic bread and so much more.  I didn't stop until 6:00am the next morning.  I still bake off and on."

Melissa - 30 years together, 2.5 years after: "I went back to work about two weeks after the funeral. It's a very strange feeling to go back. People look at you. They don't know what to say to you. I guess for some people it's easier to ignore it and just ignore you than to confront you and say, 'How are you doing'?

I think living on my own was one of the hardest things that I've had to deal with. Just figuring out how do I feed myself because there were always two of us, you know, and when you go from two to one, sometimes I don't eat - sometimes it's like two or three days, and I'm like, 'Did I eat'?"

Paula GR - 25 years together, 7 months after: "I have to be home because I keep saying I think he's lost, and I have to be here in case he comes back. I want him to find me here. I have no desire to travel.

There are so many people who haven't known love in their life and it's those people I feel so sorry for.  It's why I can't be greedy. I keep feeling I can't be greedy because I had him for 25 years."

Rebecca - 5 years together, 2.5 years after: "You don't get over it. You don't move on from it. You move forward. You know, a lot of people will think like, oh aren't you over this yet? No. I’m young, my person died, and now I have another 50, 60 years without that person. I said till death, do us part, but I thought we were going to grow old together and now that's not going to happen. And that just reminded me of a trigger. Sometimes old people holding hands in the supermarket destroys me because I'm never going to have that with him. Might I have it with somebody else? Yes. But I'm never going to have it with him. And it sucks. Yeah. And as an English teacher, I've been trying to find a better word for that for two and a half years. And there isn't one, it just sucks. And we just kind of learn how to live and exist with the suck."

Robin– 41 years together, 2.5 years after: "You need to like yourself. And I think that's important. Forty-one years together. And I know we were very different personalities. And so, you temper each other and then suddenly, he's not there. And I thought, who am I, what parts of the tempered me do I want to hang onto now that he's not tempering that anymore? I know, as I go around thinking, all right, Brian, yeah, you'll be pleased. I did this and I did that. And I think that helps because I think we become better people as a result of living with somebody for that long.

I didn't want to just all of a sudden spring back to the more flawed version of me earlier on, I'm still very flawed, and his tempering wasn't always the right tempering, but it's really interesting how we mold each other a little bit without even realizing it. Who do I become when that balancing piece isn't there anymore? I'm still trying to figure that out."

Susan R - 21 years together, 13 months after: "I didn't do bereavement counselling. I did rest a great deal. My first concern was that I had heard of stories of relationships, of one spouse ending and the other spouse leaving afterwards, kind of like a twinning situation. And I was very aware and concerned of that, so I rested. I strategically rested, like flat out, made myself lie down and rest just to deal with the biomechanics of death. You're with someone 21 years. You don't know what your nervous system is going to do. You don't know what your heart's going to do. You don't know what your brain's going to do. You have to just let it recalibrate. I had dealt with the passing of my son before. I have a son who passed, and he was 18, so he taught me, you know, one of the amazing kind of gifts that he gave me was he taught me about deep grief."

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