I feel like I’m forgetting. Not her, but tiny details. I feel like I’m losing her again and again, over and over.
I tallied up the years it’s been without her. It felt like a punch to the gut. I counted the birthdays without her, the holidays without her, the special occasions without her. It felt impossible.
Since she passed, life has been so beautiful, but also so empty. How can that be? How can both of those things exist together?
Before grief, I wouldn’t have known those answers. Now I know that I live with both fulfillment and abandonment. A heart both full and scarred from an empty space.
I don’t cry as often as I did when her absence was fresh, but I still cry. I still lose myself in the heartbreak and the pain. I still ache for her as much as the day she left. I still need her with the same intensity. It’s just different now. A shift of sorts. A grief shift.
When I find myself staring at her picture, which has been etched into the stone placed on her grave, I talk. I speak to both her and God. I pray. I wish. I hope. Sometimes, I still get angry. It’s a complex mixture of furiousness and faith. Pain complicates things. Grief complicates things.
It isn’t just the pain of goodbye but also the heartbreak of never-again. It’s seeing her in my mind but never in front of me. It’s hearing her voice on a recording, not from the other room. It’s “In Memory”, instead of making memories.
It’s a hole.
It’s an empty space.
It’s both grief and love.
And I feel like I’m forgetting. Not her, but the tiny details.
And the one thing I never forget is the pain of her absence.
