Surely there must be a better way to say it. It sounds so Edgar Allan Poe to say, "I kissed your cold dead lips." But this is what I tell him when I write to him. He was dead and his lips were cold and I kissed them. Three or four or five times I kissed them after trying to warm them with my breath.

There must be a better way to explain it than "My husband is dead." My husband, I think, Has ceased to be. And the whole thing becomes hilarious to me as I relive the experience as a Monty Python sketch and compare my dead husband to Spam. I'm a rotting corpse and I'm okay, I sleep all night, I work all day.

Eight months have passed and instead of actually talking about it, I still make the jokes.

I told the exterminator my husband had died, and he broke out his best exterminator humor. "Did he accidentally eat some rat poison?" he asked. I laughed. "Nope. He purposely shot himself in the head with a pistol."

I bought some new clothes two days after he died, because I didn't have anything to wear to a funeral. I used his check card. "You look nice, Liz," my friend's mom said. "Thanks. I used Jay's check card. I figured if he's going to shoot himself in front of me, the least he could do is buy me something nice to wear to his funeral."

The state of the union address not too long after he died: The President said something about children having to walk through a prison gate to give their mother or father a hug. "My child would have to walk through Heaven's gate to give his father a hug," I told my best friend's parents.

I'm going to the sheriff's department tomorrow to pay a visit to evidence and trade what remains of my sanity for the answer to a question. I don't even know at this point what the question is. I'd like to feel the weight of the gun in my hand, not just any gun, but the one that killed someone I love, the one whose shot is loud in the woods and almost unbearably so in a closet, the one I saw for the last time in a sheriff's deputy's hand, pinched between two fingers like someone else's underwear.

My Pop wants to sell the gun for me. He knows some people. He doesn't understand that I only want him to lock it away for me, so it will still be mine, but so that I can't touch it to hold it to my head just to know the feeling.

It's a new world of depression and madness. A whole new kind of suck, my dad said the night it happened. "Indeed," I told him. "On the list of days that suck, this is the new number one."

And what my dad said in response, without realizing what was coming out of his mouth until I started to laugh, sums it all up better than I've been able to in eight months:

"Number one with a bullet."