Grief has traditions. When someone dies, people bring food. They call. They sit with you and let the silence do its work. There’s a whole choreography built for loss like that.
There’s no choreography for this.
I was standing in the kitchen with the mail in my hand when it happened — reaching for Ruth’s name and finding nothing where it should have been. I know her. I know the sound of her laugh through the fence, the way she waves before she even sees who’s driving. But her name was gone. Clean gone, like a word erased before I finished the sentence.
I stood there a long moment, embarrassed in a room with no one in it.
This is what it’s like. Not a single collapse but small subtractions — a name, a date, a memory I used to be able to call up the way you call a friend, no dial tone, no waiting. Now I reach and sometimes there’s just air where the memory should be. A held breath. Nothing answering back.
People don’t see this part. They see me carry the groceries in, hold a conversation, laugh at the right moment. They see the man still standing. They don’t see the small funeral I hold in my own head every time something goes missing — no casket, no eulogy, just me, alone, saying goodbye to a piece of myself that no one else will ever know was there.
What I mourn isn’t dramatic. It’s the ease. The way memory used to just rise, unbidden, reliable as breath. I didn’t used to have to reach for anything — it was simply there, holding the thread between who I was and who I am. Now the thread frays in places, and I feel the fear underneath it: that one day I’ll reach and find too much missing. That I’ll wake up a stranger to my own life.
But something else has grown alongside the fear. I’ve started being gentler with myself than I ever used to allow. When my mind tires, I sit. When the flicker comes, I breathe through it instead of fighting it. I’ve stopped treating forgetting as failure and started treating it as weather — something to move through, not conquer.
I am losing pieces of my mind. I know that now, plainly, without flinching from the sentence.
But the tenderness is still mine. The reaching for connection is still mine. The love is still mine, even on the days the names aren’t.
Memory slips. I don’t.
Leave a Reply