Once upon a time...

There is no clean and tidy end to grief. It is not like a cut that heals when new skin grows, leaving no trace. Grief has a rhythm, abating at times when other things hold your attention, but always reappearing. It is like a mountain range undulating and unfolding before you as you navigate a path along it.

Grief is a nasty game of feeling the weakest you have ever felt and morphing it into the strongest person you will have to become.

It comes in waves. There’s a lull and then another wave hits you. I just wanted you to know that it is okay not to be fine sometimes.

In one of the stars I shall be living. In one of them I shall be laughing. And so it will be as if all the stars were laughing, when you look at the sky at night…

‘It doesn’t get better,’ I said. 'The pain. The wounds scab over and you don’t always feel like a knife is slashing through you. But when you least expect it, the pain flashes to remind you you’ll never be the same.’

It isn’t a matter of forgetting. What one has to learn is how to remember and yet be free of the past. How to be there with the dead and yet still be here, on the spot, with the living.

Sometimes you have grief under control. It lies low, under the radar, to where you no longer notice it. Sometimes grief hits you like a fucking freight train. You don’t know when it will happen. It could’ve been years since the last wave of it hit, but you are wracked with pain and sadness, until there’s nothing but numbness left.