This is what my character is going through but I have no idea what will happen to her in 1 year, in 10 years or 30 years.
I hope to get some examples to figure it out.
Depends.
Did you meet her and she shot you don the first time you met?
Was it another four years until another man broke her heart and you were the one who was there when everything went south?
Did you move in with her "just to pay the bills" and wind up spending six years together?
Did you get married because there was no way anyone else would ever fill that hole?
Did you find out she couldn't have children without dying and then have to spend the next few years saying that you'd stay with her no matter what?
Did you have to talk with her through the night over and over, begging her not to kill herself because you can't bear the thought to be without her?
After the thirty odd years you'd been together, do you wonder, every time you put the key in the lock that this time will be the time you come home and she is finally dead from any one of a half dozen ways the terminal illness could kill her?
...
here...
I think what you need to do first is figure out how much the person meant to the MC, then you'll know what happens next.
My family has a long history of, for some reason, picking women who die long before the men. It's genetic. I thought I would avoid it by marrying my wife, but in the end, I just found someone who had the same problem. I didn't avoid it, although she'd lived much longer than the others. Maybe because we chose not to have children. The hormonal changes are usually what starts the cascade of organ failure.
Ironically, if I had stuck to, 'my own kind', my wife would be dying from cancer, most likely, not some obscure genetic disease.
My grandfather explained it to me as, the lingering. The men just... live forever. Into the triple digits, usually. And not, drooling on yourself octigenarians. We just don't age as fast. You should see my father. You'd swear he was 60. He's 85.
But that doesn't carry to the women.
They all get cancer and die. My mom lasted until she was 50. Quite old. My sister died at 22. My other sister keeps getting cancer then surviving. She's 56. I suspect advancements in medical technology is the reason.
By my grandfather explained what happens. The women die young, the men... linger. You have this hole in your soul that never gets filled again. Oh, my great grandfather was an exception. He remarried four times, but most of my line... we just... linger. We wind up the great uncles or grandfathers who you drop off the kids to visit. You putter around, maintaining your house as a bit of a shrine. Change becomes the enemy. You develop hobbies. My grandfather worked on Chess. He was a grandmaster. Wrote a couple of books to pass the time.
What happens is you get old.
You get phantom limb syndrome, where you try to pretend she is in the other room sleeping, or watching TV, or doing anything but being dead. You leave that one room alone because if you never go in there, you can just pretend that she'd still there. Because she is. On the edge of your thoughts. She lingers in the air. You carefully preserve every thing she touched just as she liked it and just as she left it because that's HER.
You don't kill yourself. That's nonsense.
Because she loved you and to kill yourself would be to hurt something she loved. She'd never forgive you if you did that. You were something she touched as well. You were something she left a mark on, and how could you ever destroy anything that she shaped with her words and actions.
The air then grows thick with the past. It lingers as everything stops, frozen in a moment where your life and purpose has ended. Now, you are a curator to a museum of memories dedicated to one who, due to the passage of time, becomes only more perfect with every passing day. You forget the bad things. You remember the good things.
You become trapped because it hurts too much to move on.
It becomes easier with every passing day to just keep focusing on everything else BUT reality.
What happens after they are gone...
Is you linger.
You just...
Linger.
