#death poem

This week I broke down in the car.

I saw your house for the first time since and I remembered that you don’t live there anymore. That you will never live there, or anywhere, again.

As soon as the car door shut behind me, it all hit me again and I couldn’t breathe. It feels harder and harder to grasp air these days, like my lungs are always heavy, my heart too full of lost love to pump with any vigour.

It comes in waves, cruel torrents, natural disasters that strike when I think I’m okay now and that the pain is easing. Grief rushes in and fills every space, unwanted and unrelenting until there’s no room for much of anything else.

I miss you more and more, and grief will not stop creeping into every corner of my heart.

We come into this world screaming, crying, gasping for breath. We arrive fighting to live from our very first moments. Not you though, you lived quietly from beginning to end with the kind of gentle strength that gave you stamina for all of life’s longest battles. I miss you more than I will ever know how to express and Christmas without you just reminds me of all the love I hold with nowhere to go. I see glimpses of you in everything, in the eyes of the people who loved you the most and who will miss you the most forever. Your hands planted a legacy of the love you had for each of us and if I do anything in my time on earth, I hope it will be to continue that legacy, to plant seeds of kindness in the darkest of spaces. May we somehow uphold each other in the absence of your arms and the strength you so freely gave, even as it was waning.

-I miss you infinitely grandpa

“Roses are red, violets are blue,

sugar is sweet and perhaps so are you.

But the roses have wilted, the violets are dead,

the sugar bowl’s empty, your wrists are stained red.

The sun isn’t shining, the sky isn’t clear;

there’s no silver lining cause you’re no longer here.

Rain keeps on pouring, there’s no end in sight.

you’re laying there frozen, so far from the light.

Your beauty’s unreal, your smile the sun,

but time can’t be turned, nor actions undone.

The words that you wrote that only I read;

“I love you so much; please don’t cry when I’m dead.”

A bond that we formed, a love that ran deep,

a pain that we shared; a friend I could keep.

I wanted to hold you, wipe the tears from your eyes,

been there the moment you said your goodbyes.

I want to forget, but most times I don’t.

I want to let go, but I know that I won’t.

Tears on my face, memories burned in my head;

The roses are wilted, the violets are dead.

~ 4 am thoughts, Unknown