Grief is the Question

Dear H,

I miss you all the time. Grief is my constant companion, it settles in my bones like an ache.

Grief is seeing your favorite purple shoes, still with mud and grass on them. Grief is all the places those shoes will never walk again. It is all the things you will never see.

Grief steals my peace and turns me anxious, I search the house for you. Maybe you are just hiding, maybe you are just around the next corner. Where are you, Henry?

Grief alters my DNA, every cell makes room for the sorrow, every fiber feels the loss.

Grief is the shadow I cannot shake. I cannot fight it, I try to accept it. You have to try to accept this, I tell my broken heart. Just try, just try.

Grief attempts to take everything, every little sacred, precious thing.

Grief finds me in your little boy room, sitting on your floor, just shattered. It finds me crying and sobbing. It finds me limping along in the new normal.

But, to my surprise, grief does not find me hopeless.

Grief is the question. It is the unknowing, it is the uncertainty, it is the fear. It is all of the awful possibilities.

And hope is the answer. It is the secret belief I hold in my heart — maybe I am strong enough, even for this, even for this very worst thing. Maybe I will laugh again. Hope is opening up, even just a little, even for just a moment, to all of the maybes that might find us along the way.