Coming to terms with grief is probably one of the hardest things you’ll ever experience as a human being.

Knowing that one day you’ll wake up and someone you love will be entirely gone from your life with nothing but your memory of them to show for it is devastating.

And the grief doesn’t go away even after several years. You still feel the absence of their embrace on their birthday, you’re hyper aware of how six years ago in September your family got a little smaller.

After a while, the forgetting starts. 

You’re still hurt, you still miss them. 

But you can’t remember the sound of their voice. Sometimes you have to look at pictures to remind yourself of how you share a nose, how the corners of their eyes slope in a different way than yours.

That sinking feeling lurks and lingers. It leaks into the slow mending corners of your chest and it sits there. Random things will make it surge. Sometimes my grief makes me feel like I’m drowning.

I’m surprised I can even stand sometimes, with how many different shapes and colors of grief mix within me. I have a lot to grieve.

But even when you’ve forgotten, you still feel. I might not remember everything we did together. But the echoes of everything I’ve ever felt for them, with them sit right next to the grief.

Maybe that’s what keeps me standing.

Grief isn’t something to be ashamed of, because everyone will grieve, and they’ll do it differently, loudly or quietly, harshly or softly.

It’s always hard. It will never not be hard. But it’ll also be okay, too, and that’s what makes it seem a little easier.