Grief

You wake up in the morning and the day laughs at your pain. It is sunny and bright, cheerful and promising; everything opposite of how you feel.  

You count the days in minutes.  First a few seconds separate you from the person you loved, then the seconds melt into minutes and hurry into hours.  The minutes become days, weeks, and months.

You reach into a drawer, a closet, a cabinet and find you didn’t get rid of everything as well as you thought. Memories hide in the most unsuspecting and unforgiving places.  

You hear a voice and you turn, a smile on your face, ready to answer, forgetting for one second that it is not him or her.  

You think of a question, hear a joke, remember a story and you reach for the phone before you realize no one will answer at the other end.

A couple holds hands, a baby cries, you overhear a conversation, and you pray no one saw the naked look on your face before you walked away. 

If you could do it over, you would be more careful, more obedient, more diligent. You would treasure each minute, each day. You realize how much you miss what you had and how its absence affects your actions every day and your sleep every night.  

You regret words you said or didn’t, you miss all the moments you shared or didn’t, you wish you had stolen one more kiss, hug or smile. Unfinished business will forever stay unfinished.

You yell at anything and anyone – God, the loved one, the accident, the divorce, the disease. With the passing of time, you realize nothing assuages your pain.

For most of us the wounds heal.  They might leave a scar but they heal. Each in its own time. You learn to live with the wound that surrounds your heart, or that empty space will fill instead with good memories, with forgiveness, with acceptance. You can no more undo your grief than you can undo that they existed, that you once loved them, that they left their mark in your heart forever.