When All Is Said

by Anne Griffin

I didn’t have the room for your grief as well as my own, it seemed.

But having spent half my life distracted by what was outside – my deals, my empire – I often forgot to see what lay inside and how precious it was.

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.