Do you want to cry?

A poem that made me weep.

Grief is a time machine. Little else, not even smell—whose ability to transport you is more fleeting, a suggestion of being brought back to something if not always a certainty—can get you right back to the Right After.

The first few times it happened (first weeks, then months, now years afterward) I felt suspended. My whole body shaking not only from sadness but from fear that it would not end. That I was back (and for how long?) in the deepest pits of grief, the raw-skinned days when memories fly in like locusts. The unbearability of grief lies in its threat of persistence. How can you go on when all you can think of is the one thing you’ll never be able to change?

It does not, cannot go on forever of course. Giving in leads to giving way. Opening the floodgates for the pressure to roll through, until it is evacuated, temporarily.

The maxim of time healing is true to an extent. The day-to-day becomes easier. Life introduces new characters, new challenges, new conflicts that push it to protract bigger than the grief. Even the relationship with the one you lose continues, differently, but it does. It is not final, I suppose, until both parties are on the other side.

And yet every so often, something happens to pull you right back to kicking, screaming, immediate pain of the beginning, and you wonder both how you ever thought it could ever be gone forever (there is the kicking yourself for trying to graduate from grief with an unblemished report card) and how it could return so fiercely.

Recently, a childhood friend of mine sent over the poem “Miss You. Would like to take a walk with you.” by Gabrielle Calvocoressi and the time machine booted up again.

Two and a half years in, I understand that resistance only drags out the suffering, so I midwifed it out in the shower, steam and heat pulling out the tears like charcoal, drowning out the feralness.

Afterward, sat in a towel on the edge of the bed, I copied the poem, deleted the specificities and filled it in with my own images, my own cherished details like a death-edition Mad Libs. More tears came, until they didn’t. It’s the first poem I’ve “written” in years.

Nothing can go on forever. A reassurance, a warning, a truth that makes what we do matter more because it is not infinite. Such is the price of admission of loving someone.

More and more, I am coming to see my grief as a gift—a practice I have been tasked to take on daily, that has softened my edges and strengthened my insides, sharpened my compassion and lessened the trivial, everyday sweats. After all, the worst outcome can happen, and things, if we’re lucky, will still go on. It’s right-sized things in a way. I would trade it all for my dad back of course, but until that’s a trade presented to me, I’ll take the gift of what his departure has left me with instead.