I feel like grief is a little yellow canary that lives caged in our hearts and it calls out often in the beginning—with all its might. Then it feels that you can’t possibly take it anymore so it gets quiet for a little while and lets you rest. It understands you might cease to live if it keeps singing. But then some nights or days it sings a little—to remind you that you’ve loved, even if they don’t exist here anymore. That you made it right, even if it was the last chapter.

It reminds you of what his hands felt like those times you held them, alive and warm, soft and fragile….and what they felt like when they were lifeless, stiff, ice cold.

You turn numb.

It gets quiet and you go on living until it sings again, at 2am—and then there’s not enough air to catch your breathe, and you are reminded of the sunshine that shone as he was driven away, how the rainbows came out after his funeral, also his birthday. It sings to remind you of the moment he said in a goodbye you didn’t know was a goodbye, “I can’t do this anymore” and you said it was okay.

And the peace breaks open into agony.

You wish you had more time. He told you “I wish I could talk to the others the way I talk to you” and you hear the music from your childhood and all the silence ever since.

And then it gets quiet and you’re not sure if you’ll ever cry again. But then that little bird looks at the sun and sings his words again, “….I love you too”

Grief—to the ebbs and flows that fall and rise and quiet our souls into the night. I keep my grief in a box—except when it comes out to sing. Tonight the little canary sang.

 

 

 

 

 

(inspired by J.Robinson)