I know exactly what they mean about words like these. I, myself, had traced 'blue'. I traced blue with my finger on my father's lips after the doctors called Time of Death. I had weighed in my palms the heaviness of a 'lifeless hand'. I had held 'cold' in my arms. I had whispered 'brave' in my mother's ear when I told her she could go.
And I know the 'quiet pace' of a daughter who had ceased to be one--suddenly, irrevocably. I had walked this pace, in my mismatched slippers, all alone from the hospital and back home, certain only of the news I was carrying to my younger brother and sister.
I know also about the impatience of 'friends' that we get over the loss, as if there was a time frame for grieving. I had coffee with someone once, who told me to stop 'whining' about dead parents. I was five weeks into grieving and she wanted me back into the business of decoding her affair with a married man. Even the earth we dug up again to bury one more parent hasn't begun to heal at all.
And I know about memory, too. I know acutely that I hunger for shared memories, like how a man is hungry for food. A few days ago, I came across a post by my mom's best friend. She was just remembering October, and the friends she lost in my parents. I couldn't express into words my gratitude for this remembering.
So I'd write about loss, sometimes. I write because only in my remembrance of them am I able to honor how they had lived.
I write about loss because we never stop loving those who are gone. Because all the love we have for them fly out of us not knowing where to go. Perhaps it goes into what we write; perhaps it goes into the remembering. But where I can, I hold steady this love so I may feel them near.
I write about loss because between Never and Infinity, I am cursed with Every Day: I grapple with the absence of a parent I can make proud, and with the sudden untruth of 'coming home'. Home has become a lie, a space I suddenly had to redefine so that I would not have to accept that I will never come home again. They are very very far away. My breath is our distance; their memory, my curse.
And ultimately, I write about loss so I may find grace where there is none.
Here's to the struggling, to the grieving, to the frightened. Here's to those of us who feel unceremoniously abandoned, having lost perhaps the only people who will ever love us without question, without measure, without pause.
May you also find healing, where you can, and may you never ever forget how you had been loved.
