#kat chow

This is the thing about grief: Despite how much we want to forget—how much we try to ignore—the dead are still here. Waiting, watching.

I haven't wanted to kill you, so I haven't written about your passing. I can write around your death. I can write about the events that inch up to it, and the ones that illuminate its aftermath. But ask me to write about the day itself, and I can't. I can't. I can't. It's like killing you.

Language—reaching for it, exploring it, trying to understand it—has always been how I’ve made sense of myself and the world around me. Language provides a connection to something or someone; language is a shield against loneliness.

That is what it means to lose someone, understanding how, after all these years, memories shift and shape us. How we cannot exorcise someone as much as we try; we must learn the ways in which we preserve parts of them in ourselves.

The way I endured grief was to think only of the after, and not the before.

What is grief, if not the act of survival? How can it be anything else but persisting through an enormous loss?