Finding Grace

by Loretta Rothschild

He no longer cared what time it was. It was as if he knew that from now on, there was just before and after.

When Tom arrived home, the whole house was silent, yet everything spoke. It was as if the house had been burgled but it wasn’t the contents that’d been stolen, it was the context.

Aging had been marketed all wrong. The world seemed to prioritize a regimented skincare routine over the wonder of getting old.

Nobody on earth has the constitution to metabolize the sudden and terrific loss of unconditional love.

The days are long, but the years are short”—which used to annoy him. But now he’d learned the hard way just how true that was. Everything was just a click away from the past tense.

Grief’s iron grip never weakens. You just become accustomed to its hand around your throat, moving forward but never moving on.

You can’t boycott grief, unless you want to boycott happiness with it. You don’t get the meat without the bones.”

It isn’t your life that flashes before your eyes when you’re about to die. It’s the life you thought you were going to have, just before it’s snatched away from you forever.

When I died, Tom became a widower, a word that needs no further explanation. But there is no word in the English dictionary for a parent who loses a child. They remain the same: a father, a mother, suspended in time. Forever explaining, forever retelling, forever tethered to an indigestible loss.

There is no knack to grief. It’s like the sky—it hangs over everything. Sometimes the sun peeks through the clouds, other days it rains, and some days it pours.

But love wasn’t measured by its ending. It was every cup of coffee, broken boiler, empty crisp packet, and train ride.