When All Is Said

by Anne Griffin

Not that we were the perfect couple. But we were good, you know. Solid and steady. At least that’s how it felt for me. I never asked her, mind.

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

‘I’m here to remember – all that I have been and all that I will never be again.’

I never asked her how she coped losing the person she knew best. The person who accepted her humanity and all the failings that came with it. The person who loved her unconditionally. The person whose hand was always there to hold. I wish now I had.

The company of the trusted, what? Being understood without having to explain and not having to pretend all is fine. Being allowed to be a feckin’ mess.

he greeted us with a compassion that made me wary. I wasn’t used to kindness, having never looked for or given it to those beyond my own.

the same things matter the world over: saving face and money.

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.

Loneliness, that fecker again, wreaking his havoc on us mortals. It’s worse than any disease, gnawing away at our bones as we sleep, plaguing our minds when awake.

I’ve felt the ache of her going in my very bones. Every morning, every hour of every day I’ve dragged her loss around with me.