Grieving For Jonathan

Since my husband died, I have tried to do the impossible: reanimate the love of my life word by word, tweet by tweet, text by text.

- Nancy Westaway

FOR MONTHS, I HAVE BEEN SEARCHING through tweets, emails, Facebook posts and text messages for a missing person. He isn’t a stranger. He’s my husband and the father of my two children. And he’s not really missing. He’s dead.

Late at night, after I put our kids to bed, I begin my hunt for Jonathan. I reread emails about mundane dental appointments or brunch dates. “Whose job is more important today?” reads one, sent when a child needed to be collected early. I linger over quick asides, our children’s pet names and his simple sign-off, “love JJ”. Each time, I find another morsel, some note that makes me smile. I can almost hear him. But I know I am trying to do the impossible: to reanimate the love of my life word by word, tweet by tweet, text by text.

My husband was a writer. He made wry observations in a few crisp syllables. We met at journalism school in Winnipeg, Canada in the early 1990s. I am strangely attracted to a badly dressed man, I thought at first. He needed a haircut, and he wore runners and rugby shirts he got from playing the game. I hated sports. We used the same carpool, and our daily commute became a rolling, laughing ride through the streets. Jonathan’s biting wit earned him the sarcastic moniker “Sunshine”.

In school we learnt how to interview and tell stories accurately, all while meeting high-pressure deadlines. Soon after graduation, eager to begin our careers, Jon took a job as a newspaper reporter in Edmonton and I started working as a managing editor at a news and entertainment weekly in Winnipeg. We were still just friends, but I felt hollow when he moved away. One perk of my job was a computer with internet access. I quickly connected with Jon and two other members of our carpool.