There are certain parts of grief that seem to change with every passing moment. Little broken things that shift in the soul like shattered glass and at their worst break something else amid their rattling.

I figure the pieces can be bigger and I’m not sure whether that’s better or worse, whether carrying them with you like some hole that is not whole is better than having something broken to shards small enough they occasionally come and take the life out of you.

Depends on the person I suppose. The strength in their character, the seams that hold them together.

A year ago, a little more than, I was panicked, anxiety ridden to the point I managed to find myself in the superposition of fearing death and wishing for it. Not for it to end for the sake of the bad that is, that will find me, but because of my existential fear that what lays at the end of this is nothing.

That void. That place that is not a place. The thing only the living fear. That thing that even now, writing about it, bites at me, gnaws at the dangling nerves of my psyche like the tongue of a starving dog.

Then to have to apply that to someone else, someone old, but no less cherished, no less fitted into so many parts of my existence, like tearing a mummy cloth sized Band-Aid from every part of you, gobs of flesh and synaptic mortar coming off like pieces from some blood born puzzle.

Every one has to do this.

I tell myself this.

Countless millions have and in the process succeeded in living long enough to die themselves and pass that survivors’ burden to the next generation. Which makes the guilt of lingering sadness, that subconscious need for solitude and recalibration feel wrong, unnecessary in its cost to the still breathing world around me.

The idea of processing grief while your still new smelling daughter grows and learns in the company of only half the love they truly deserve and remaining parent is forced to carry the burden you have diagnosed yourself as incapable, unwilling to share in.

So there you have grief, dread, and fear, snuggled warmly against the base of my large intestine making calls to drink, to cry, to put any and every piece of life on pause by any means possible until anxious failure takes center and simmers in the cynical joy of rolling laughter.

And here I sit. Drowning while sitting still. Mourning the loss of a man I’ve spent a decade telling myself I would have to mourn, but made no stronger from that understanding.

There is death and then there is the love that wishes to follow, wishes to grab the hand of eternity and squeeze until death is nothing but a dull, piteous memory, an unstoppable force relegated to the ilk of childhood misfortune.