The paradox of my grief
Tomorrow (well, today now I guess, since it’s 2:40am), it’s been four years. It seems crazy. Four years? Really? I am annoyed that I know this day, that I keep track, that I mark it. How stupid. It doesn’t have to mean anything. It can be just another day.
But it isn’t.
The feeling is different every year (every day) but it also never changes. grief is so weird, don’t you think? when opposite things are equally true.
I miss her, often in unexpected ways, but I am use to her being gone. Not just because it’s been four years (which is a whole other kind of pain, this almost perverse ability we humans have to just “get over” anything and move on).
Having lived away from my family for much of my adulthood, her being dead is functionally no different to my every day life than when she was alive.
But each year that goes by is another memory that gets lost. Another story that gets forgotten. Details fade, shapes blur; the shadows have begun to take over.
It is a black hole, this space where she once existed. This paradox. vast and heavy, in a tiny little pinprick. How is it possible, that it can keep growing, swallowing everything. And yet with every breath, every blink, the pinprick gets smaller and smaller.
She is disappearing but her absence is expanding.