Light a Candle

The day has come and gone.

I have done little to be reminded of that moment, that moment you left.

I light a candle feeling as I did twelve months ago, as though it was twelve months ago.

That minute where there was warmth, there was life.

Then it was cold.

Just cold. No life.

It was done.

It was over.

I cried, I cried and I still do... every time I let myself go back and feel you leave.

Seconds before, feeling you embrace the body that could not longer hold on,

the strength of your heart pounding through to me and mine.

We wanted you to stay but it was time to go.

Today felt like all the other days.

This one was no different.

Still as lost, disconnected, difficult, lonely and empty.

Days do not become easier.

And that feeling of grief, loss, love - losing you - hasn’t changed, or lessened.

The apparent five stages of grief have gone and passed after repeating several times.

Still, it is the same.

Still the pain lingers within the love lost.

You were everything I could never be.

You had the determined strength I never did.

I envied your perseverance and attitude;

even in the blinding darkness which seemed to envelope me, you would somehow see through and pull me with you.

But now, you are gone.

There is no more strength pulling me through what I knew I could not.

Picking myself up has become harder, lonelier, just not the same without you.

I cannot talk about my grief. Because it is so much more than that.

Words do little to express or bring together everything you were to me for so long.

I question if anyone could truly comprehend the magnitude of this.

And really, it does’t matter if they can or not. They didn’t know what you were to me. And still are.

Loves comes and goes, but you, will always be. This just is.

Life is not life without you in some way.

I see your presence in my boy.

The instructions you left behind that he embraces with all his might, as he had promised he would.

I see you gave this to him before you left.

My boy comes to me knowing why I am upset.

I can see it in his eyes.

He misses you too. Like a void we cannot fill.

An emptiness that always feels cold.

I rarely share this with anyone. Only fragments really.

“Let it out and cry” I am told as though this will decrease the intensity of what I feel.

It doesn’t.

It does’t change.

In snippets of passing time when I am alone, it is quiet, I mourn all that you are to me;

all that you gave, and all you were. My private hell of grief unrelenting in tears and feeling torn apart.

But to the rest of the world they do not see, they do not know the pain I carry in every second as the weeks and months pass.

As it has come to the first year of you being gone it hurts just as much as I felt your last breath leave your body and my world.

I tuck away the endless tears in that place where I have you - loved and protected.

My broken heart stuck together by the thin strands of memory, scar tissue and the band-aid my boy gives me every night before I go to sleep.