The Last Love Note

by Emma Grey

Maybe I’m distracted on purpose, and I’ve subconsciously engineered a frantic, overcommitted, hectic whirl so I can always put “busy” center stage, and grief can only ever hover in the wings.

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.

when you’ve borne witness to a body in peak physical condition spiraling until it’s unable to will itself into one more day, it’s harder to care whether breastfeeding has deflated your boobs or a miracle growing within you has graffitied your skin.

“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.”

It was an avalanche of support that snowballed out of the hospital and into our world, from the moment everything fell apart. But this was a long haul. It required the kind of persistent help that outlived most people’s practical capacity.

This is a long goodbye. I’ve been losing Cam in pieces, each progression taking part of him from me by stealth. I say goodbye each night when he’s tucked up in bed at seven, and I don’t know how much of him will be there the next day. Just less. Always less.

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.