Aseret's Journal

The hurt never goes away. We never forget. We never get over it. We don't want to. We hurt so much because we loved so much. But the focus on death and the event fades, and the warmth of good memories replaces it. We can still go back there in an instant—back to the call, the moment where it all changed forever. Back to the night that will forever separate our life between “Before” and “Now”.

I have fewer friends--better friends, but fewer. I am out of the circle now. The amazing thing is how much I don't care. I have new and different priorities. I move through life a little slower, a little more tuned to life around me, and to life gone too soon. I hurt for the people who share this walk with me. I feel for them and for their families in a way I could never have before. I value people more than things, moments more than milestones, and I no longer equate what I do with who I am.

I am not having the life I expected to have. When you are unhappy your image of where you should be is dramatically different from where you really are. The reality of the life we are going to have is altered forever. How many times do we imagine them here with us today?

I do not mourn the past. The past was good enough for me. What I mourn is the life that could have been, but will not be. Not now. Not ever. The grief I have goes unspoken much of the time. I miss him quietly and silently to myself. I grieve for his loss; the loss of the person he was, the loss of the life I would be having if he were here.  I grieve for the person I once was.

I made a list of the people who where there when I needed them most. These are the people who dropped everything on a moment's phone call. The faces and voices that came to us through the haze and the numbness of that awful time. I want to find those people and say thank you.

It does no good for the loss of one to lead to the loss of two. What does do good--is doing good. To decide to live the second part of your life differently than you would have before in your loved one’s name. When we do that, when we do one small act of kindness we never would have done before, when we reach out to others because we have been there, then the world is changed in some small way for the better. The actions we take can become a living tribute to our loved one’s life. And in that act, they are never gone from us.