Four years ago today, I stood in a quiet room filled with flowers and unbearable silence, staring at three caskets that held three pieces of my heart. The air felt too heavy to breathe. People whispered condolences I could barely hear. Time moved strangely — too fast and not at all. And then came the moment no one prepares you for: I had to decide when they would close the lids.
It is a choice no parent, no loved one, no human being should ever have to make. How long is long enough for a final goodbye? How do you measure the last seconds you will ever see a face you love? I remember reaching out, memorizing details — the curve of a cheek, the stillness of hands that once reached for mine. I remember wanting to freeze time and run from it at the same time.
When the caskets closed, something inside me closed too.
People say grief softens with time. What they don’t say is that it changes shape. It comes in waves — raw, unexpected, heavy enough to knock the air from your lungs. Some days it is quiet, a dull ache humming beneath everything. Other days it crashes without warning — in the grocery store, at a red light, in the middle of the night when the house is too still.
I used to think surviving meant being strong, not crying, moving forward quickly. Now I understand it differently. Surviving means breathing through the wave instead of drowning in it. It means allowing the memories to hurt because they also mean love. It means carrying their absence like a permanent shadow and still choosing to wake up each morning.
Four years later, the grief has not disappeared. It has settled into my bones. I am learning not to outrun it but to carry it — gently, deliberately. I survive by honoring them, by speaking their names, by letting myself remember. I survive because love did not end when their lives did.
And somehow, even with a heart forever altered, I am still here.