The Last Love Note

by Emma Grey

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.

Whatever else happens, everything feels possible with him by my side.

Each time I stand on sand, near waves, I feel a tiny bit more human. More myself. Or some new version of me that’s a little less heartbroken and a little more together. There’s something about the unstoppable rhythm, no matter how bad things get, that comforts me.

It’s a lot like grief, standing here. You’re dragged from the shallows into the depths where it’s dark and heavy and you can’t see or hear or breathe. There were times over the last two years when, if I screamed, grief would swallow up the noise. It was bigger than my voice. A whirl of emotion for which there’s no sufficient word in the entirety of the English language.