it's been such a long time, but i still feel you close, hear your giggle, see your smile, smell your applesauce cooking on the stove and the scent of your home. what words of wisdom might you have shared in the face of mom's struggle, of my own heartache? did you carry your own grief deep inside for all those years? is that what gave the cancer the edge it needed to take you from us too soon?
in lots of ways, i feel like i've come so far since i last saw you, that i really am a woman with some measure of wisdom to offer those who might hear it. but there are nights when i wish i could talk with you about what it means to lose someone you love. do you start to wonder, the more time that passes, whether the person you loved existed? at some point, the love we've lost becomes an idea, doesn't it? we keep growing and changing, and maybe our vision of the person we lost changes, but it becomes memory, thought, imagination more than reality, as we and the one we love can no longer walk a path together in the way we once did.
i've loved so deeply that the sting of loss goes on despite all my best efforts to face and accept the waves of grief and anger - at first more frequent, now less so - as they've come, to delve deep inside to discover layers of detail and meaning, to use that awareness of all the nuances of my experience to practice acceptance and compassion. yet pain is not the whole of my experience. i guess i just thought that taking everything head on would somehow remove the sting. you know better than i do. i don't even know if you felt you faced your own crushing losses head on, or whether you tucked them inside, hoping that by hiding them, they might vanish. in this time when we are both so close and so far apart, i want you to know that i will always love you
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