Death is an end.

Except it isn’t. Of course it’s not. Traffic keeps flowing, the sun rises and sets, and the world continues.

My own personal grief is another thing that began before the death and continues after the moment. Every day is different. There is bereftness, and occasions where I catch myself thinking I need to tell, I need to get, I need to go, I need – then I remember. Even months on there remains bouts of urgency.

Death is paperwork. Observing the official work but also coping around the incidental stuff.  Grief is collecting belated mail, hearing the phone still get messages, and noting appointments to be cancelled.

Grief is rest. Grief is learning a new normal without you. Grief is time. Grief is guilt and memory. Grief is distraction, and mourning an excavation. Grief is forgetting for a second you are grieving.  Grief is working, grief is chores. Grief is weather: whatever you are doing you are doing with, and in, and despite its changeability.

It being inconstant, yet present, grief is the background radiation of the universe, you are not always aware it is there, but it exists. And like background radiation grief is proof of existence.

Grief is an aggregator of older griefs. However, grief for each specific person has its own unique flavour. Including this specific person. I miss you and I am sorry too, that I’m ok even though you are gone.

Grief is wanting to freeze time, and also to go back, or to move far forward to outrun missing you.

I wish I could reroute around the damage but there is only through. There are no shortcuts but grief is wanting to search for a formula to make it redundant. Perhaps if I write the word enough I can render it nonsensical. Like children repeating the word giraffe until they are giggling so hard they need to ask what “giraffe” means when they catch their breath.

If grief is everything does that make it impossible? Like a map of the world that is the size of the world? Despite or maybe because grief is everything, I remain myself, so there is a reference to Borges. You’re welcome.

Grief is shock at the reminders of loss in mundane places: in certain supermarket aisles, on a drive to the compounding pharmacy, anywhere football is in the media or being discussed.

Recovering is something else. Yet recovery is exactly the same as conscious mourning because really there is no healing from the damage of loss. It is only that time builds over (covers) the wound left by death so that the scar only hurts sometimes. What looks like healing is layers of dirt over a midden. Poke hard enough and it can be all laid bare.

Thus, the beloved dead and the feeling of loss remains a weak spot, and the work of time as repair is in a wall that cannot be remade to be the same as it was. Thus, I am changed by knowing you, and changed by mourning you.

This is perhaps, the hidden truth, we contrary creatures, in a universe of inviolable flux, grieve change in evolving ways, like change itself isn’t inevitable.