Bill Castro is still getting accustomed to being single. His wife, Debra, has been dead for 10 months, but this Friday marks a year since he lost the life they had together.

Mrs. Castro, a native of Barbados, was returning from a Manhattan doctor’s appointment on the Staten Island Ferry when the boat slammed into a maintenance pier, killing 10 people in one of the worst transit accidents in the city’s history.

The 39-year-old St. George resident was the most severely injured passenger to survive initially. She lost half of her right leg, all of her left leg, and part of her pelvis, and her abdomen was sliced open by mangled steel debris.

During the two-month period that followed the crash, Mrs. Castro remained in a coma and underwent more than 20 operations. Her husband spent nearly every waking moment at the hospital with her until she died, nine days before Christmas.

As the one-year anniversary of the ferry crash approaches, Mr. Castro, 46, and members of the 10 other families that lost relatives are still struggling to come to terms with the seemingly inexplicable voids in their lives. Mr. Castro, a city bus driver, is generally upbeat around friends, but his voice gets soft and his tone despondent when they leave and the conversation turns to his wife’s death.

“For a while I was walking around in a coma,” he said Monday night at a restaurant up the street from the ferry terminal. “I was so numb. I still can’t believe it happened.”

The reminders of his wife are inescapable. When he went back to work a few weeks after her death, he was assigned to the S52 route, which meant driving passengers between the ferry terminal where his wife was injured and the hospital where she died.

Their apartment, which his wife elaborately painted and decorated, remains a memorial to her creative flare. It sits about a quarter-mile from the ferry terminal, and a row of the bright orange boats can be seen from the living room window.

He can barely move in any direction without hitting a landmark in their lives. The couple exchanged wedding vows during a no-frills ceremony in Borough Hall, down the block from the office where, five years later, amid the chaos of the disaster, Mr. Castro re ported his wife missing the night of the crash.

In the past 10 months, Mr. Castro, a graduate of Susan Wagner High School who was born and raised on Staten Island, has taken three trips to his wife’s homeland of Barbados. It is a vacation she had always wanted to take with him.

On his first visit, last February, he, along with a group of friends and relatives, buried her ashes. On the most recent trip he explored the island’s sites, but also ordered a headstone for her grave.

Mrs. Castro suffered from rheumatoid arthritis and fibromyalgia. She was out of work and could not have children. Her husband thinks the condition made it hard for her to move out of the way during the crash. But he was left to piece that together by talking to others, because she never awoke to tell him her story.

Mr. Castro has a $220 million lawsuit pending against the city. He is one of more than 180 people seeking a total of $3.3 billion in damages from the city. As of July, the city had paid out $531,900 to 25 people in suits that asked for a total of more than $60 million. Mr. Castro’s lawyer, Abram Bohrer, said yester day that the city had not made a settlement offer on the case.

In the year since the crash, operations and procedures at the Staten Island Ferry have come under the microscope. The city’s Department of Transportation announced an overhaul of operations several months after the crash.

The ferry pilot who blacked out in the pilothouse, Richard Smith, is awaiting sentencing after pleading guilty in August to 11 counts of manslaughter, one for each death. And a criminal trial into the actions of two ferry supervisors could take place in April. The city has said the supervisors were not responsible.

With the legal situation still pending, Mr. Castro wears his wedding band on a chain around his neck and keeps his wife’s ring in a box next to his bed. He purchased a small rock fountain she wanted for the apartment, and he said he’s thinking about redesigning the kitchen, another of her wishes.

He has his profile posted with an online dating service, but he sounds deflated when he talks about it. He says the crash made him realize how precious life is.

Like other families who lost relatives, Mr. Castro says he is upset that Mr. Smith, the ferry pilot, is expected to serve a maximum of only 33 months in jail. He gets frustrated when he talks about the developments in the case. But he tries to focus on the positive when it comes to his wife.

“I guess I could be bitter and hateful, but what would that achieve?” he said. “I just feel lucky that I got to know her at all.”