When All Is Said

by Anne Griffin

No one, no one really knows loss until it’s someone you love. The deep-down kind of love that holds on to your bones and digs itself right in under your fingernails, as hard to budge as the years of compacted earth. And when it’s gone … it’s as if it’s been ripped from you. Raw and exposed, you stand dripping blood all over the good feckin’ carpet. Half-human, half-dead, one foot already in the grave.

Her eyes met mine, just long enough not to embarrass us but to acknowledge our beginning. I knew for certain then, that there, sitting across the red Formica table, with the perfectly placed condiments, was the woman I was ready to love until the life went out of me.

It was simply knowing he was there, that meant the world to me. I didn’t need him to do anything other than just be alive. Is it the same for you?’

The worst thing has been the fear that I’ll wake one morning and she’ll be gone from my memory forever, and that, son, that, I just can’t do.