As for grief, you’ll find it comes in waves. When the ship is first wrecked, you’re drowning, with wreckage all around you. Everything floating around you reminds you of the beauty and the magnificence of the ship that was, and is no more. And all you can do is float. You find some piece of the wreckage and you hang on for a while. Maybe it’s some physical thing. Maybe it’s a happy memory or a photograph. Maybe it’s a person who is also floating. For a while, all you can do is float. Stay alive. In the beginning, the waves are 100 feet tall and crash over you without mercy. They come 10 seconds apart and don’t even give you time to catch your breath. All you can do is hang on and float. After a while, maybe weeks, maybe months, you’ll find the waves are still 100 feet tall, but they come further apart. When they come, they still crash all over you and wipe you out. But in between, you can breathe, you can function. You never know what’s going to trigger the grief. It might be a song, a picture, a street intersection, the smell of a cup of coffee. It can be just about anything…and the wave comes crashing. But in between waves, there is life. Somewhere down the line, and it’s different for everybody, you find that the waves are only 80 feet tall. Or 50 feet tall. And while they still come, they come further apart. You can see them coming. An anniversary, a birthday, or Christmas, or landing at O'Hare. You can see it coming, for the most part, and prepare yourself. And when it washes over you, you know that somehow you will, again, come out the other side. Soaking wet, sputtering, still hanging on to some tiny piece of the wreckage, but you’ll come out. Take it from an old guy. The waves never stop coming, and somehow you don’t really want them to. But you learn that you’ll survive them. And other waves will come. And you’ll survive them too. If you’re lucky, you’ll have lots of scars from lots of loves. And lots of shipwrecks.

I can’t wait to be in a place where my memories of our time together don’t make me sad anymore. Those days were some of the best in my life. I want to be able to think back on them, to smile to myself and cherish them, without feeling like my entire world is falling to pieces.

If you know someone who has…lost anybody who’s important to them, and you’re afraid to mention them because you think you might make them sad by reminding them that they died, they didn’t forget they died. You’re not reminding them. What you’re reminding them of is that you remember that they lived, and that’s a great, great gift.

Our grief is a suitcase that rests at the foot of your bed every night. Every morning when you wake up, you must pick up your suitcase and carry it with you. Some days, this suitcase will be very light, full of warm beautiful memories and easy to carry. Those are our good days. There are other days when the suitcase is so heavy that it must be dragged with you as you struggle to make it through. Then there are those days when you may not be able to lift the suitcase at all because it is so heavy with the loss, sadness, pain, and regret. On those days, we need help to carry that suitcase, so ask for help. But everyday, that suitcase is with you, it never leaves, just as grief doesn’t leave you. It changes from day to day, but never goes away. It becomes a part of you, that you take with you every single day. But remember the good times, and on those days, it is just easier to carry.