Forgetting

Le Chagrin

I flee from the dark corners where the sadness lies

dormant but not annihilated. 

I try, try to keep your memory alive, try to keep you fresh in my mind,

but people here don't know you.

There are no new stories to share,

only the same repeated episodes. 

I question their significance, I doubt their accuracy.

But I long to remember.

I pine for the rawness of those early days,

to feel the tragedy alive and familiar.

Everyday I lose you all over again through the absence of triggers, the passing of time.

Deliverance comes when your laugh 

pierces through the flatness of my heart and rings

crisp but echoed in my ears.

I hear your joy, your present joy,

the delight you found in life with us and now with I am.

I can cry for you again not out of pain but out of the purest, deepest joy and expectation.

Sometimes...

it's ok to still feel sad, to have found peace, but no answers, to have moved on, without completely getting over it.

It's ok to flick back through photos, to laugh at the eager, innocence of the faces that stare back at yours and then wonder what you'd have done differently if you had only known.

It's ok to find that your neatly folded emotions and coping mechanisms are in fact still a tangled mess of grief that you stuffed at the back of your soul for another time.

It's ok to have spent some time not thinking about it, to have almost forgotten what it was like to ache and then sit there one evening and remember it's heaviness.

It's ok to still feel helpless.

It's ok to wonder what things would have been like if it hadn't happened.

It's ok that there's still so much more to say.

It's ok that it still can't be said.

It's ok that you're still grieving.

The Next Stage of Grief

Trying to remember you

is like carrying water

in my hands a long distance

across sand

Stephen Dobyns