Learning To Dance...

It started small - a sound, a song, a line that I've heard you say over and over again. I smiled when I heard it, thinking of you. But as the minutes dragged on, that smile faded and is once again replaced with this pain, this emptiness.

It's so curious: one can resist tears and 'behave' very well in the hardest hours of grief. But then someone makes you a friendly sign behind a window, or one notices that a flower that was in bud only yesterday has suddenly blossomed, or a letter slips from a drawer... and everything collapses.

To lose someone you love is to alter your life forever. The pain eases, there are new people, but the gap never closes. This hole in your heart is the shape of the one you lost - no one else can fit it.

My brother will die over and over again for the rest of my life. Grief is forever. It doesn't go away; it becomes a part of you, step for step, breath for breath. I will never stop grieving Andre because I will never stop loving him. That's just how it is. Grief and love are conjoined; you don't get one without the other.

You will lose someone you can’t live without, and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your loved one. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn't seal back up. And you pull through. It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly — it still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp.