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.

Losing a loved one

‘Moanie Maurice,’ she used to call me in the latter years. But the awful truth of it is I would have been a thousand times worse without her. I could almost feel it as I walked through the door, the armour slipping away as she took my coat or kissed me on the cheek or put her hand to my back as she laid my dinner down. Jesus, son, I should have told her every feckin’ day what a marvel she was.