The thin space between us

Dearest Abby,

I find it very hard to write this to you.
I cannot comprehend that it has been 5 years since I last held you in my arms.
Where has that time gone?
 I cannot grasp that you left this house ON August 13th and simply never came back.
I was so lost in those first days and months after you died.
 I was searching and searching and just doing things to keep myself going on the outside.
But, on the inside time stopped at 9:44PM on the night of August 12, 2013 where you slipped out of my sight and out of my life. I've struggled with that thin line of you being here at 9:43 and gone at 9:44 since the moment it happened. That stark, brutal, incomprehensible small sliver of time and space between living and leaving.  That silent piece of time still haunts me. There was a final breathe and then there were no more. There was a heartbeat that suddenly halted. There was life that ceased to exist in one small incalculable amount of time and I was powerless to stop it. In that one infinitesimal second of space, life was over for you, and for me it was irrevocably completely altered. 

***

In the width of that final breathe,

everything changed for me.

***

There are realities that hit a little at a time as a death is processed. Hard truths that you don't acknowledge or just won't let you mind process. Perhaps it's just the way we insulate ourselves from the harsh truth. But one thing is very clear, my life will not get better. That it not to say it won't be good or that there won't be laughter and joy. No, what I mean is that life will never be as good as when you were here. It will never be better than before you left. No matter where I go from here, nor what happiness I may find, those future events will never replace the past that is gone.

***

I suppose that is why the word

LOSS

while incomplete
 sums it up well as we grieve.

***

When you lose someone close, you adapt to the loss,
with the horrid subtraction that death brings.
You realize once there was a time when you were
  whole,

and no matter what,

THAT is one thing

you

will

never

be

again.

***

The further out I go from your death I do realize it prepared me for things I didn't even understand I needed to be prepared for. But, I will simply never again live in a world of invulnerability. I will never live in a world of completeness nor of feeling secure. I lost all of that along with losing you. Now it remains to me so important to keep your memory alive. For there are so few who knew you, so many are gone too. We lose part of our histories when we lose someone we love. It's a sad reality that it makes some uncomfortable when the dead are mentioned. For it brings great fondness to the person who grieves that although it may bring a tear talking about the one we lost, it also brings great joy, just knowing they are still remembered.

***

I am still searching.
I am still lost.
 I am still trying to understand.
I am still feeling less secure because I've seen firsthand
 how unpredictably the world can be turned upside down in that single sliver of time.
I struggle trying to understand how others can accept death seemingly so simply and push onward outwardly,but that I can't. I don't understand that. I haven't reach that "switch" where I can turn off or on all of the things I feel are gone which once meant so much.I realize that we all have to go on, as forward is the only direction time takes us in. But, I haven't been able to put a pristine ending to you being gone. I suppose I see it as the catalyst of the beginning of many things that ended and made my life so deeply complex. But all I know is that I loved you then and I love you now and I know with clear certainty I will love you with my dying breath.

***

And that I miss you

everyday.

Every

Single

Day.

***

July 1, 1999

August 12, 2013

***
The words I put on this haunting photo are:

Grief is forever.
It doesn't go away.
It becomes a part of you.
Grief and love are conjoined.
You don't have one without the other.
 the reason we never heal
is because LOVE never dies.
That maybe....
the reason we never heal is
to keep hope alive.

Hope begins in the dark,
the stubborn hope that if you show up
and try and do the right thing,
the dawn will come.
You wait and watch and you work.
You don't give up.
~Anne Lamott

And Piglet said....

if ever there is a tomorrow
when we're not together
there is something you must always remember,
you are braver than you believe,
stronger than you seem
and smarter than you think.
But the most important thing is even
if we're apart...
I'll always be with you.

***
Somewhere out there
I believe you are still with me.
But, it's hard being the one left
behind...