Every new year comes in with the promise of new and wonderful things. We make resolutions to be better in myriad ways: more compassionate and more charitable, more active and healthier, more informed and more productive.

But sometimes the new year arrives with the unexpected.

How do you continue life–at at any time of year–without a person or people who have always been in your life?

How can you begin to look the to days ahead? How do you lift the coffee pot from its base and pour coffee into only one cup? How do you prepare lunch for one and eat it by yourself? How do you fill the afternoon hours? How can you read the paper when there is no one with whom to discuss the news? How do you face the dinner table alone?

I’m trying to get my head–and my heart–around this, but right now I only feel lost. I cannot imagine what it must be like to lose the person with whom one has shared one’s daily life since adolescence. The person with whom you brought children into the world, children you struggled and worried over. The person you argued with and supported and stood up for. The person you shared Christmas Eve conversations with when you thought the kids were asleep. The one you kept on with after all the kids were grown and gone, working and traveling, talking and sleeping and waiting for the holidays.

There must be a way, but I can’t imagine how.