My wife died six months before the pandemic struck. Already alone, I was now quarantined with my grief in a house the virus had narrowed from confining to claustrophobic. If the disease didn’t choke me, I worried that loneliness would. My children call every day and I speak by phone with a few close friends, but loneliness breeds in a silent house.

The evening before Muriel died, we were enjoying wine and cheese when she exclaimed, “Bob, we’ve been married for 66 years and always have so much to say to each other. Do you suppose other couples married this long have so much to talk about?” As she spoke, an infection was massing within her. Her intestine had perforated, and 18 hours later she was dead of septic shock. The talking stopped. It was as though I had been sentenced to life in silence.

I’ve been assured in bereavement groups that after a year the anguish would become less piercing. I would endure the loss forever, but there would be days free of pain. Before the pandemic, my children and grandchildren came from around the country to be with me. Friends invited me to dinner or to just talk. I rarely spent more than two days alone during the week. Even if my pain wasn’t softening, I was surrounded by love that carried the promise of healing. But now doors have closed and there are no visitors or invitations to dinner.

I’d read about casualties of despair and vowed I would not become one. But without Muriel, I wasn’t sure how I could prevent that from happening. Over the course of our marriage, she had gone from high-school dropout to psychologist. It was Muriel I turned to in moments of doubt.

We met when Muriel was a 17-year-old fashion model and I was 22, just off a troopship from Korea. We began talking almost immediately, revealing dreams and fears we’d hidden from others. Bored with high school, she simply stopped going to classes shortly before we met. I had just enrolled at Columbia University, thanks to the G.I. Bill, and the books I was reading excited her as much as they did me.

We married after my freshman year. Muriel would read the notes I had scribbled on 3 by 5 cards and pose questions I was likely to face on tests. She insisted it was her tutorials that helped me graduate in three years instead of four.

By then we had two children and were surviving on the G.I. Bill’s $160 monthly benefit. I needed to find a job, and fast.

Nervously dressing to go to what I was told would be a final interview at a bank in Manhattan, I felt Muriel tug at my arm. “I’m sure you’ll get this job,” she said. “But it means we’ll be seeing much less of each other. I want you to promise something.” Whatever the length of the vacation I was offered, I was to request an additional week. I hurriedly promised I would.

I had been warned that even inquiring if there was a vacation could end an interview, but I found the courage to ask for three weeks’ vacation instead of two. The executive interviewing me seemed startled, but granted my request so long as I told no one. When I returned home, Muriel had only one question: “Did you get us more time to be together?” I had, and it remains the most important promise I ever made.

While I was at Columbia, Muriel earned a high school equivalency diploma and began applying to college the day I graduated. She went on to become a psychologist, and her years of schooling initiated a ritual that lasted for over a decade. When I drove home from work, I would find her waiting at the front door at our 850-square-foot Levitt house on Long Island. Edging toward the car, she would say some version of: “Kevin is watching television and needs a bath; Leda is in the play pen; and Shanna is in the high chair, where I think she just pooped. There’s a chicken potpie in the oven for you. Give me the car keys; I’m late!”

Three children in four years, little money and a house that smelled of diapers made even the most trivial dispute combustible. But, in our early 20s, we vowed never to go to sleep back-to-back in a silent bedroom.

Eventually we moved to a larger house in Great Neck, a leafy suburban town where Muriel began her practice. Its screened porch overlooked a garden and was the only serene corner in a noisy house, perfect for the clients Muriel quickly began seeing. When our children expressed even the slightest hint they were jealous of the attention she paid to clients, she would take out her date book and say, “I’m giving you an appointment. How is 5 o’clock tonight?”

Just this week I asked Kim, our youngest child, if she remembered those talks. “Oh,” she said, “I think about them all the time. It might have been only one hour, 50 minutes actually, but I had Mom all to myself. She made the porch a safe place to discuss anything, even things kids don’t usually tell their mothers. All my friends were jealous.”

I didn’t need an appointment to talk with Muriel. Even on evenings when we went to dinner with friends, we would hurry to the restaurant an hour early to sit alone at the bar and talk over a glass of wine. But, now I slept in a silent bedroom.

A Buddhist friend, aware of my loneliness, urged me to talk with Muriel. “You were together for nearly 70 years,” he told me. “She’s not gone. She’s in your being, your awareness. Talk to her. Ask for her help.” I was about to shrug off his advice, but was in such pain I would try anything.

The photograph on the wall nearest the thermostat I adjust every morning and every evening is of Muriel. She seems so full of life that it wouldn’t surprise me if one morning I awoke to find glass on the floor and the frame empty. I decided to talk with that picture. I began to hear her voice, just as I did every evening before we slept, when she would rest her head on my chest as we spoke of the day and of our love for each other.

Had there been no pandemic, I would have continued turning to family and friends to help me cope with Muriel’s death. It would have been their voices I heard, not hers. But, as I began talking with her, I realized that instead of relentlessly lamenting to others what I had lost, I was hearing her remind me of what we had. It was as though her voice was a hand she held out to lead me from depression to hope.

The grief I carried with me into isolation has softened slightly, thanks perhaps to the passage of time. But if I am beginning to heal, it is because the pandemic forced me to turn inward, to learn if I had the resources and will to go forward without Muriel. It was in the silence of my empty house that I discovered she was with me, that I had found her voice and the confidence it gave me to walk back into life when the pandemic lifts.

Robert W. Goldfarb is a management consultant and the author of “What’s Stopping Me From Getting Ahead?”