What Matters

#writeingrief Day 20

The time doesn’t matter. This is about the loss and the love. We can’t control our human reactions or constraints. We can’t control our reality. We can’t control much of anything, can we? Perhaps just how we respond to our reality. I don’t know why I have the urgent desire to fix every little problem, especially when I know someone who is in pain from grief or illness. I don’t have that same reaction to my own pain. I know undeniably that it cannot be fixed, so why do I have this weird instinct to tackle and tame another’s pain? We have this way of measuring time with our clocks and calendars. Our sun and moon. Our sky. But is what matters how many days that we had with them? How many months since they have been gone? How many minutes until we will be with them again? Is it the time that matters? Last year I wrote a blog post called 19 Days: A New Calendar. And I ticked those dates (still do). How many weeks pregnant I Should Be (Why, hello, little unicorn! It’s been a few days since I wrote about you). How many hours. Days. Months. Whatevers since Alaska’s birthday. Since Auburn’s. But none of that matters. I don’t love Elliott more because he has been my son longer than Asher or their baby siblings. Love cannot be measured like that. Yes, we forget details. We just lose them in the maze of thoughts. The lost memories can potentially be found, right? Those memories are still there even if they are stuck under a heap of useless information. Even if we could rewind back to the moment just after the loss, our person is still dead, and we still love them. And if we jump ahead to the moment just before we die, our person is still dead, and we still love them. This love and loss is more than our human realities of forgotten moments and counting minutes. This love and loss cannot be diminished by memory or time.