Day 118

Your mom texted me, crying - a rare thing - wanting to know if I would share the email you sent me. Unless it’s too personal, she says, but I say of course. Just give me a few days to face it. I haven’t been able to read it again, yet, myself. They are too real, those last words you wrote to me.

I want to call her, cry out my pain but I can’t add to hers. There is no comfort to be had for any of us. You should be here, and you’re not. Your fine mind, what happened to it? So hard to accept that the light just went out on all that you knew, worked for. Of course we who lit our candle in your light carry it forward. In Spain, China, Brazil, Korea, beyond.

Nothing’s too broken to find our way back, goes the lyric from that song we like…but I could tell that songwriter, one Mr. Chris Martin, that death is very definitely the ultimate broken. I keep telling myself that you’ve never been to the place I live in now, so of course it will take you awhile to find me. When I’m alone I call out your name, wherever I am, to help you find me, your ghost or your essence or your spirit or whatever might remain of the part of us that was you.

I read that grief is the shadow love casts in the light of loss. I like that - most poets talk about loss as darkness, but loss is a lot more like light. Darkness provides relief, but the light pries our swollen eyes open, leaving us squinting, laid bare.