Writing grief

 

A friend tells me to journal my thoughts, and I don't say there is no ink the color of grief. What paper could hold absence, what words hold its shape? The answer is all of them. 

Grief trickles through  this draft where I cannot use the phrasing "X lost their child". Because losing my father sounds like the sort of stupid thing a child might do at a mall, letting go of their parent's hand. A silly mistake, easily fixed. Death is anything but transient. Grief breaks through when a friend talks about how sentience is defined by pain, and her voice is drowned out by the ICU doctor's, clear as this moment. Grief leaps out in the sunshine, sits by my pillow in the dark, hugs me in my dreams. Maybe one day there will be words to wrap around this. For now, there is only the living of it.