12/08/2025
The soft haze after ringing myself out.
Is that where you are?
Swollen eyes and salt crusted skin.
Is that where you are?
The nauseating, bone shaking sobs.
The throat catching, all two powerful waves that won’t ask or wait.
Is that where you are? Yes, and…
You are in the memories flooding in.
Of Triscuits and cheese, of snowboard trips and family dinners on Sundays.
Less of the recent and more of the times when I was your child.
Before I had my own.
Our life, coming back to me.
The gift and the grief always intertwined.
To remember is to feel you. To feel the way you live in me. Forever.
And, it brings with it the knowing of what will not be.
The void left where my parents have always been.
39 years of life framed by those who made me.
The truth of my grief is that it is never one or the other.
You will never leave me because you are in the shape of my hands.
And, I will never hold yours again.
I feel you in every thought, every ripple of memory, every PopPop plane and Lini Cracker. And.
You won’t hold my next baby or dance at my wedding.
The truth of my grief is in the AND.
The truest way I know how to honor you and me.
What is grief if not an honoring? A devotional hymnal of the love that makes it possible for our hearts to break.
So where are you?
You are right where I am. In the AND.