This Is Not How It Ends

by Rochelle B. Weinstein

No one ever talks about the end. How in days leading up to it, you beg a higher power to take your loved one away, to relieve them of their suffering. And then when they pass, you can’t imagine anything more horrible. The finality. The dissolution. It’s the great paradox, the ill-fated hypocrisy: In life we watch them suffer. In death it is we who suffer. There is no in-between.

Abandonment leaves a painful mark. It inks you for life, if you let it, making you believe you’re not worthy, leaving you distrustful of wishes and dreams, when they only disappoint.