Bernice Bunny Giles looks through a family photo album in her Pratt home as she discusses the tornado that swept Pratt County in May. The tornado destroyed her home, killing her husband, Alexander, and leaving her trapped under two trees in her basement.

This photo provided by the family shows Alexander and Bunny Giles in their Pratt home. Now in an assisted living center, Bunny struggles to continue without her husband. You

Pratt ? Bunny Giles had just fallen asleep when an alarm blared at the assisted living center where she is trying to make a new life.

Panicked by the noise, Bunny rushed out of her apartment in her pajamas just after midnight. She didn’t even grab her robe.

It was just a false fire alarm, but Bunny was sick to her stomach for hours.

Sleep has not come easily to Bunny since one Friday night in May.

The sound took her back to the night an EF-5 twister swept up her family’s farm in Pratt County, leaving only papers and splinters behind.

Picking up the pieces

Every night, when Bunny closes her eyes, this is what she sees: Her husband, Alex, lying in a mud- and debris-filled basement on the farm where they’d lived 61 years together.

What she hears is Alex calling out to her before he died.

Some days, she thinks it might have been better if she had died in that basement with Alex. Other days, the retired nurse feels she still has a lot to live for.

The assisted living center is stop No. 3 on her journey as an 82-year-old woman who lost so much in such little time.

Bunny spent five days at Pratt Medical Center after the tornado that leveled most of nearby Greensburg.

That was stop No. 1.

Doctors released her the day before her husband’s funeral.

“I didn’t even have clothes to leave the hospital,” she said.

And there was nothing to bury Alex in.

The place where he’d always bought his suits sent three choices home with his family. “This one looks like Alex,” a friend from the funeral home said, dressing him in a navy pinstripe suit, a pale pink shirt and a navy tie with accents that picked up the pink of the shirt.

Another store sent six outfits for Bunny to consider.

The storm had taken everything. The other day, as the weather cooled, Bunny realized she has no winter clothes. She never found her home appliances. Someone found one of her canceled checks in Great Bend.

Bunny misses the comforts of a home. But she knows what matters most.

“My husband is the greatest loss,” she says.

They were one week shy of being married 64 years.

Moving on

After the funeral, Bunny stayed for about six weeks with her daughter Cheryl Marciano in Hutchinson.

That was stop No. 2.

Her other daughter, Vicki Luth, who lives in Illinois, also stayed for a while.

The house was big enough for everyone to have some space.

When you’re grieving, it’s important to have a quiet, private place to retreat, said Bunny, a retired registered nurse who worked the last 16 years of her career as a psychiatric nurse at Larned State Hospital.

Sometimes people tell her that she doesn’t seem sad. “You don’t see me when I’m alone,” she told a friend recently. “I’m cheerful when I’m around you.”

Greg Giles, her son, found his parents the night of the tornado.

“It was traumatic for our son finding us like that,” Bunny said. She was trapped under trees until rescuers freed her.

Greg and his dad farmed together. During harvest, in his 80s, Alex drove a semi.

“He just didn’t think about himself being 84,” Greg said.

Greg is harvesting now. He had to hire someone to replace his dad’s free help.

Recalling his father’s life

Greg and his sisters grew up in the house that’s gone now, a three-bedroom one that their parents moved from Trousdale. It used to be the superintendent’s house of an old school. When the school closed in 1967, the family bought the house and moved it to the Hopewell farm where they’d lived since 1946.

On the farm, they raised corn, wheat, rye, soybeans and cattle.

“The main thing I keep reminding myself is how many good years we had together,” Greg said. “I’ll admit there’s days I cry. Dad and I saw each other every day.

“To me, there’s a lot worse ways to pass out a life. Dad did what he loved the last day he lived: He helped me out on the farm. That comforts me a lot.”

The Joan Didion book “The Year of Magical Thinking,” which chronicles the weeks-apart deaths of Didion’s husband and daughter, sits on a table at Bunny’s apartment.

The book was a gift from a niece.

Bunny devoured the best-seller twice and still reads excerpts that move her.

Didion describes what an ordinary day it was when her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, slumped over dead.

“She says, ‘This was an ordinary day, and then he was gone,'” Bunny said. “And that’s what our day was like.”

Bunny now lives at Parkwood Village in Pratt.

Bunny doesn’t need the nursing assistance Parkwood offers, but the complex was the only place she could find to live after the tornado. So many people relocated from Greensburg that apartments and rentals have been scarce.

Parkwood is stop No. 3.

She lives in a small studio apartment furnished with a bed that feels too big, a small table, three chairs and a microwave. She eats in the dining room.

Sometimes she feels walls close in. She thinks she’s still in shock. She sleeps fitfully, feels sick.

Every so often, Bunny will talk about Alex as if he’s still alive. She’ll speak proudly about what a good driver he is or how he doesn’t look like he’s 84.

Sometimes she’ll instinctively turn to her side to tell him something she heard or read.

People tell her she should cherish her memories. She understands they mean well.

“But memories don’t cut it,” she says. “You miss that loving arm around you.”