She died

She died on this day two years ago but somehow nobody knows. The world keeps on turning and everything keeps on going. I want to scream it loud sometimes - that she's gone, that she died, that it matters. But it's no-one's loss but mine, ours - those who knew and loved her.

In the early days it was a huge hole I kept falling into at every turn. The first time was less than a week after her death. I decided to make a dessert, needing to weigh out ingredients as though I could somehow weigh out grief and make it into something more palatable and easier to stomach. Only I couldn't find the scales and rummaging in her cupboard I turned to call out to her, to ask her where she kept them... then there I was, at the bottom of a huge hole. There would never be another answer to me calling out her name.

Heart-bruised and soul-sore from falling in and having to scramble out over and over again, I learnt to navigate my way around it. Two years on and the path towards that deep cavern of missing is overgrown and I don't walk that way much any more. It's not a forgetting, more a heightened awareness of how to avoid the pain.

It amazes me, the capacity we have for absorbing grief and loss. What feels unbearable at the time becomes something we learn to carry. The razor-sharp reality of it carves its way through bone and into the marrow of us. That startling clarity that comes through viewing life through the eyes of the dying, dims once again to blur and myopia.

Her death silenced me. I couldn't find the words to make sense of it and I didn't see much point in trying. She died. I miss her. There's nothing else to say.