What Remains

There is a particular kind of silence that follows loss.

Not the ordinary quiet of an empty room, but a silence with weight. It settles into corners, into cupboards, into conversations that stop just short of where they once would have gone. It lingers in the spaces where something — someone — should be.

People speak about time softening grief. I am not sure that it softens it. I think it teaches you how to carry it. At first it feels impossible, like trying to hold water in your hands. It slips through your fingers, it soaks into everything, it leaves you trembling. And then, somehow, you learn to live with wet sleeves.

There are losses that rearrange the furniture of your life. They move the walls. They alter the shape of every future plan. The world continues — traffic moves, emails arrive, seasons change — and yet your internal landscape has shifted. You become someone who measures time in “before” and “after.”

The hardest part is not always the moment of loss. Sometimes it is the ordinary days that follow. The supermarket aisle. The school shoes on sale. The offhand question: “How many children do you have?” The way your heart answers differently from your voice.

Grief, especially this kind, is not always loud. It is not only weeping and breaking. Often it is quiet. It is strength you did not ask to develop. It is getting up because you must. It is loving fiercely what remains, even when your arms feel emptier than they should.

There is something else, too — something people do not speak about enough. Love does not disappear. It does not reduce or fade simply because the person you love is no longer here in the way you expected. That love remains, unchanged in size. It has nowhere to land, and so it settles inside you. It becomes part of your marrow.

You learn that grief and gratitude can sit in the same room. That joy can return in small, careful ways. That laughter does not mean forgetting. It simply means your heart is still capable of light.

To those walking this road now: there are no correct words. No timetable. Only breath by breath, day by day. And the quiet knowing that the depth of the grief speaks to the depth of the love.

Some lives are brief. Some goodbyes come too soon. But what was loved so fiercely does not vanish. It changes form. It becomes memory. It becomes tenderness. It becomes the way you hold others a little closer.

For now, it is enough simply to carry it.

To wake up.
To breathe.
To love in the only way you can.

There is no need to be strong beyond this moment. There is only today. And that is enough.