The Void and The Veil

Your bones, your flesh, so firm one moment – so capable of receiving healing. Your thoughts, your spirit, so fixed within you, so capable of interacting with others whom you love. One moment, and then, the next, you’re gone. The flesh no longer lives, the thought that breathed life into it has wandered or shot out of the shell, quick as a fraction of a moment, gone before we have been able to draw breath to say goodbye. Oh, and how different your eyes without your spark behind them, and how nightmarish they have become for the echo we still remember there. We look, and our own eyes, and our hearts, begin to bleed the tears of loss for being forced to release you before we were ever ready to. Now, the world is different, your echo is everywhere – the space in which you belong, in which you once stood or laid, is unnaturally vacant, abandoned; and there is a void, like a black hole sucking at the light and our hearts, which is felt whenever we see or sense your not-thereness. That void, that emptiness where you should be, tears at us whenever we encounter it, catches us off-guard, and it feels like your going has ripped a tear in the fabric of reality; as though, perhaps, if we were to stand or lay where you once did, we could reach through the veil and touch your spirit and maybe feel whole again. Death is not the worst thing that can happen to a person or animal, it is simply the worst thing that can happen to those who love them. I found your hair today on my bag while I was out, and I nearly fell apart. You are constantly reminding me of your existence, no more here, absent but unforgotten. I miss you, and my heart is still bleeding its tears. 

For Frank, and for Ashley