She washed the shirt
My late wife passed away just over four years ago after a long illness.
Unexpectedly, about a year later, I was reunited with an old friend I had completely lost touch with throughout the entire social media era, as she had moved to another country, and I also moved to a third country, so neither of us could find the other. A year after my wife passed, I had dipped my toe into the dating scene again but I was NOT looking for anything serious. Despite that, the heart wants what the heart wants, and after we were miraculously randomly matched on a dating site, we ended up engaged, and eventually, married.
While I was out of town for a couple of weeks for medical reasons, my new wife was reorganizing our bedroom and our shared home office, and she removed a t-shirt that belonged to my late wife, and put it with the general laundry. It was tucked away in a seldom used drawer in a chest of drawers, and i had shown it to my new wife years ago but she likely forgot and didn’t realize the significance of that shirt. I had kept a single shirt belonging to my late wife unwashed so I could smell it when I was particularly missing her. It had lost most of its scent after four years, but it was still comforting.
That said, now that it has been washed it just smells like clean laundry. I sprayed it with what little of her old perfume I have left but it’s not the same as her natural scent.
I’m not mad at my new wife, it was an honest mistake and she was trying to do me a huge favour by cleaning and reorganizing the house. That said, it still stings that it happened.
Maybe I should have locked it away somewhere, but it honestly was almost devoid of scent at this point anyway.
Still, like forgetting her voice, forgetting her scent has been a longtime fear of mine, and now it’s going to be reality.