Dealing

the connection of grief

Dealing

Grief is the only border that never closes.

No passport, no prayer, no cleverness exempts you…

except the hollowed ones,

the ones who move through the world

without the burden of loving anything enough to lose it.

The rest of us…

we are drafted.

War takes them.

Disease gnaws them down to whispers.

Metal and chance and one wrong second

collapse a future like a lung.

Youth, bright as a struck match,

snuffed between two ordinary moments.

And suddenly…

we belong to each other in a way we never asked for.

Time fractures.

There are those who walk through molasses hours,

each second a held breath that never releases,

their lives dragged behind them

like torn fabric in a storm.

And there are others…

unbroken, unpaused…

who pass by in clean lines,

their days clicking neatly forward

as if nothing has been taken.

Both are unbearable.

The grieving family…

always the same shape, no matter the language.

Hands with nowhere to go.

Rooms that echo too loudly.

A chair that becomes an accusation.

And still,

we learn a strange kind of strength.

Not the kind that lifts or conquers…

no,

the kind that sifts.

We sift through what remains:

a laugh caught mid-air,

a hand on a shoulder,

the way light once touched their face

like it had chosen them.

We take these small mercies

and turn them over,

again and again and again,

until they smooth into something we can hold

without breaking open.

We refuse the ending we were given.

Not the hospital’s cold arithmetic.

Not the church’s tidy answers.

Not the ruin, the sirens, the last impossible moments.

We choose,

with a kind of stubborn defiance,

to remember them alive.

But grief does not leave.

It speaks every language,

and none.

It nests in the marrow,

quiet as breath,

patient as shadow.

It lives wherever something has loved

and been forced to let go.

And so…

we go on.

Not forward, exactly.

Not whole.

But carrying.

Always carrying.