Some days it’s almost as if he were upstairs reading...

Rob at home a year before his death. 

Some days it’s almost as if he were upstairs reading. Perhaps, he would be sitting in the easy chair he loved that used to be in the guest room, or in our room putting away laundry—folding it as he did so perfectly.

The old familiarity developed across decades together resurfaces and I am all anticipation, and as quickly as I want, I remember too.  In that second, it’s as if all that I have felt punctuates my breath and my heart stills. I have to stop myself from calling up the stairs to him, as I remember he is not there, cannot be there. Not anymore.

Sorrow is as fluid as breathing. And though I do not dwell in sorrow, the many faces of loss surely have changed me as well. I want to tell you that this loss, this single parenting, this need to take stock of self has made me a better person. And that is no small thing in this age of me, me, me. I carry these three years of experience like an extra chromosome and am reminded that all privilege is stripped at death and how we have lived is the measure of our lives, not what we have acquired.

To say I miss Rob would be wrong, for miss, is too milky a term. There are no words I know.

Even now after three years have passed, loss is incalculable, fleeting, rooted, recalled. It is all of these things and none of these. The only constant is the inconstancy of grief and pulsation of life,  Life demands, and I find it impossible to not greet it fully.