Watching someone you love die takes something from you; It takes a kind of innocence you did not even know you had

You learn how fragile everything is, and how little control you actually have; then you start to see how much of life people spend pretending there is always more time

I do not expect anyone to understand this as it depends on emotions, back stories, where you are from, where and how you were brought up

I lost my parents five months and seven days apart. They were part of my safety, part of my history, part of the person I believed I was
Most days now, I barely recognize myself

I still love people, and I still care; yet I have almost no patience left for the fake, the performative, the unnecessary: Grief burns away everything that was never real

And here is the hardest thing I can say:

I hate myself sometimes for how I have survived the last eleven years; still looking for the silver lining or searching for dry land where I can bring my ship in: Sometimes there is no shore, and the most honest thing you can say is that you are still lost at sea
October 31 and April 7 are not normal days to me

They are the days my world broke

Every year, they come back:
memories, tightness, exhaustion, fear, and literally the ache in my body that remembers what my mind is still trying to carry
It’s not weakness, it’s not going backwards; It is love with nowhere left to go

I have learned something else!

We do not simply let go of the people we lose, we carry them in memories, in conversations, in photographs, in dreams,in rituals, in the parts of ourselves they helped create

The relationship does not end: It changes!
I do not move on from my parents, my heart moves forward with them

So if you are grieving, hear me

We do not have to perform recovery for anyone We do not have to find the lesson on schedule We do not have to be better by a date somebody else picked

Grief does not follow a calendar; our pain returning on an anniversary does not mean we failed

We are allowed