The Last Love Note

by Emma Grey

That’s the problem with grief. It’s not packed tidily in a box that you can bring out in appropriate, private moments and sort through. It’s threaded inconveniently through everything.

You can grieve a breakup, too, and grieve someone’s absence from your life, but when someone dies, it’s soul-deep. An impossible-to-grasp, endless absence not just from you, but from the entire world. You won’t run into them by accident in the supermarket. You can’t stalk them on social media. Your best friend won’t furnish you with gossip about their next steps. There’s just nothing. Forever.

I will always find a way to reach you. I want to remember you until the very end.”

“Take it from a very old woman. No amount of sadness is going to bring your husband back. Did he want you to be happy when he was alive?” “Blissfully.” She smiles. “Don’t take that away from him, then, in death.”

He’s probably sorry this is exposing a wound. What people don’t get is the wound is always exposed. You can’t be reminded of something when it’s all you think about, even after you learn to go about the business of the day simultaneously.

His absence will be the eternal backdrop to everything else I do until the day I die.

How long is it reasonable to drag out your recovery from grief until you’re expected to get your act together again? Or maybe that’s where I’m going wrong. You don’t recover from it. There is no “healed” moment. You just absorb it into your new life, somehow, and go from there.

Grief is strange, when it happens in advance. Since Cam’s diagnosis two years ago, I’ve been processing this loss every day. I thought the time we had to accept it would make it easier. Sudden death must be so blindsiding in comparison. But now I’m here, I’m blindsided anyway, because I never truly believed this would unfold. Never stopped hoping for a miracle, even though we were so obviously not going to get one.

what if we fall in love?” I ask, even though it terrifies me to express it. “How do I know you won’t get spooked?” How do I know I won’t? “This one I do know,” he answers steadily. “You can trust me not to leave.” “Are you sure?” He looks more vulnerable than I’ve ever seen him. “The time for me to run away from you before that happens is long gone.”

This is not a fork in the road, I realize. It’s just the road. There’s no Story A and Story B. There’s one, imperfect, meandering direction.

I wanted to write about grief, but it’s landing on the page as so much more than that. Maybe because, even in loss, there’s so much more to life.

I’ve learned that love outlives death. It holds steady through despair. It won’t fade, even as time elapses and distance increases and your world shifts.