Loss is inevitable in life.
Grief is heavy.
There are moments when the emptiness becomes an unbearable weight. Body held prone, spine pressed into the earth, time stolen, thoughts dazed, breath shattered. Memories overwhelm. Your soul shakes.
Finding any semblance of balance in this new reality is challenging.
The pain of loss eventually wanes. Hours become days, weeks turn into months, the years inch past, but the weight of grief never lightens. Instead, you learn how to manage the load. Even as the sorrows pile higher, you shift and rebalance, and trudge on, growing stronger under the burden. Bereavement is a muscle.
A hospital chaplain once explained loss as an ocean where waves of grief crash over the survivor. Like successive rolls surging up the beach, the water eventually reaches the waterline and dissipates. The swells become smaller as the tide shifts and recedes. You do better, find firmer footing, until that seventh wave comes out of nowhere and knocks you down.
Ass over heels.
Again.
And again.
Oceans feel eternal. Tides rise and fall. Waves traverse the surface of the water. Loss is a part of every natural cycle. Things fall apart. Are pieced back together – sometimes through acts of sheer will. The world is different. Nothing is the same. The aftermath sucks. But you get better at navigating. A rhythm exists. You learn to ride the surf, to anticipate the roll of the breakers, resist the riptides even as sand is sucked out from beneath your heels.
The years promise to add to your load.
And they do.
But you find the strength to keep going, back bowed under the strain, the burden grinding on. We survive to carry the memories a little longer, a little farther.
You left on the longest night of the year. Today there’s a new echo in the rooms of my life. I miss you, my friend.
Lesann Berry 