I didn’t cry when I heard you had died. I don’t know why. Maybe my antidepressants get to dull some of my emotions, I don’t know. But I miss you today.
What you have left is an emptiness that cannot be filled. When you were with us, I sought your wise counsel or I simply passed on a bad joke, a link to some new music or just shared an anecdote. You did, too.
People talk about closure after death. After a funeral, they say, that’s what you get. And in a way, you do. Any remaining and utterly irrational feelings that actually you aren’t really dead and it’s all a horrible dream come to a shuddering end as soon as you get to see the coffin.
Absence, it is true, does make the heart grow fonder. There are places I no longer go to, other people I see no more because you were the bridge. The weight of loss, which I know is far greater for those even closer to you than I was, hangs heavy in the air. And the apparent injustice of your passing, which was surely so premature.
What I don’t miss is your suffering, which may have contributed to the absence of tears. Death, when it came, felt like a deliverance, a blessing perhaps. If I had tears for you, how many of them would have been for me, for who and what I had lost? That thought has got me to where I am today.
I miss you, it feels, more than ever. The strange thing to me is that I am able to smile a bit more when I think about you, something that felt very forced after you left us. The so-called celebration of your life, well meaning though it was, didn’t feel much like a celebration at all. It felt that we were somehow being forced to celebrate when we just wanted to mourn.
I’ve had to change my life in order to accommodate your loss and I know that that big hole in my life will always stay that way because you were irreplaceable.
And you know what? I loved you, too. I wish I had said so when you were alive because I am no longer embarrassed to tell people I love them. You made my life better than it would have been and I know how lucky I have been to have you in my life. All I have left is memories, but what memories! And I hope those memories never dim and fade away.
I haven’t cried in the time since you died. Maybe I never shall but that doesn’t mean I didn’t care. I did care. All I can do now is carry on. I am sure that’s what you would have wanted me to do, too.
I miss you today.
