“The death of a beloved is an amputation.” ― C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

The sound that escapes my being is guttural. It should take me by surprise, but I do not notice. At that moment, nothing surrounding me is clear anymore. The walls are folding in on me. Everything spins and spins. What I have heard cannot be true. It cannot be this person I love. It cannot be this very life. Taken away. Suddenly. Immediately I am flooded with all the memories of her. Too many of them. Sweet smiling. Sweet cooking. Sweet teasing me. Sweet talking to me on the phone. Sweet laughing, her head thrown back. Sweet waving at me on the phone. Sweet blowing me a kiss. Telling me she loves me—something she’s always said so freely, so readily. Her face. Her voice. Her hope. Her kindness. Her warm presence. Her unabashed expressiveness. Her hugs, oh my, her hugs. These memories of her, all countless of them, collide in me at once. Its force cripples me, shuts my whole body down. It cannot be true. All that life, all that vibrancy, to imagine that a new stillness has taken over it. That she will no longer walk into a room, no longer sit on the couch and have a conversation with me, that she isn’t here, isn’t here, isn’t here anymore, that this absence is a permanent one, shocks me, maddens me.

I want to pull my hair out. Claw at my throat. Scrape my flesh against something until it bleeds. To hurt myself into oblivion. To stay in bed for hours, a blanket over my head, a cloth of darkness my new sky. To be trapped in this space, unattentive to the world. Hidden and small. To erase myself. To plunge myself into some kind of exit door that only I can see. To go down down down. Sink this heart further. The loss stops me in my tracks. The grief keeps me there in the woods, insists that I make of this thing some kind of dwelling. It is unbearable—all of it. I can’t believe it, I can’t believe it, I can’t believe it. This is what I say to myself as I drag myself out of bed. As I stand naked in the bathroom. As I make dinner. I can’t believe it. My disbelief is real. I am not being dishonest with myself. I am not being delusional. The difficulty is recognizing that now there are two worlds: one in which she was and one in which she isn’t. Time seems to have shrunk to these two markers. The years with her and the years to come without her. The split is brutal. Ruthless. Life and death. One moment, we are walking along the edges of life, consumed by our cares, and the next, we slip into the other, where every chase comes to an end. We break away. Our fingers release their hold, our voices fade, and our bodies move away and away from all that we know.

What I keep feeling is the shock. Even more than the grief is this profound disruption, the awareness that something has happened that I didn’t see coming and I am numbed by its arrival, utterly crushed by it. I can’t seem to shake it off—the reality that this is permanent. That our days will go on without her.  She was here, and then she wasn’t. I can still hear her voice, her laughter. I can still see her face. It is the strangest thing trying to imagine her without breath. Gone. Lifeless. Where does it all go? Where does she go? What about all that she leaves behind? Hard to wrap our heads around it, but indeed death is the evidence of God—that there is no escaping it, no pleading it away, that it will come for us all, no matter how we’ve lived our lives, no matter the wealth we build, no matter what we believe. We will breathe our last breaths and exit these bodies, leaving everything behind. How temporal, how fleeting, how startingly small our lives in the grand scheme of things.

Sweet, I miss you every day. Your last days were filled with so much love. You were surrounded by family and you were served and cared for by hands that you had come to trust. I still remember seeing you when I came home in May. I remember both of us screaming in excitement. I remember how you hugged me and hugged me and hugged me. How you wouldn’t let me go. How you held on to me, saying my name, saying my name. I could stay in your arms forever. We talked for hours, sitting next to each other. What a gift, your presence. What a gift, to have called you friend and Auntie. To have known you, to have witnessed a faith and devotion like yours. My own Sweetheart, you have given me one of my favorite lifetime gifts. I promise to steward this well, and most importantly, to live my life clinging fervently to the One who wove me together. To spend all my days abiding in Him, that should I cross the bridge to the other side, all I’ll be doing is going home. No matter how hard it is to believe, I am convinced that this is still the best ending for all of us—to be absent from the body and be present with our Lord. What separation? What distance is to be measured between the Creator and His creation? There is none but a perfect union! A joyful homecoming. Yea, even with all my tears and sorrow, nothing beats the real and tangible embrace of our Father. Away now, you have all that we desire.