Thales Bretas, widower of comedian Paulo Gustavo, wrote a text to talk about the three years without her husband, who died on May 4, 2021, due to complications from Covid-19. “04/05. Even though I try not to be too bothered by this date, a melancholy overtakes me before, during and after it. Although I don’t talk much publicly about grief, it lives inside me, whether I want it or not. Nobody wants to. But the fact, and what I’ve learned over these three years, is that he is and will always be here.
The doctor said that Paulo’s death has not been overcome. “It transformed me forever, like a birth. While birth is the promise of a new world that reveals itself little by little, death is the certainty that a world has ended abruptly and definitively. People ask me how I managed to “overcome” or move on after such a loss. And the truth is that you can’t overcome it. Not even time heals. It shows you the need to find yourself again in this absence.
Bretas continued: “And I think, I always thought and I will think that there is a lot to live for while we are given this present. A present that revokes the past, reinvents the future… but reveals surprises, every minute. Good times, very bitter times… some they are digested in minutes. Others mark you like scars, and make you a completely different person, forever. And what is forever? It’s a little of what I feel today. Tomorrow may be different. But my marks I carry with me. They are never the whole. But part, in my forever, will always be.”
