Death leaves a heartache no one can heal, love leaves a memory no one can steal.  

It has been 46 days since my dear friend Scott died.  46 days of feeling a numbness inside, a stillness that I can’t seem to shake.  These painful 46 days permeate our 23 years of friendship.  I struggle with remembering the amazing and the good and instead am weighed down with the sad and the bad.  It is, simply put, just that.  Sad.  Sad to have such a fullness, such a presence – ripped from my life.  Sad to know his precious children and loving family are suffering with his absence.  Sad to know the world lost a loving, sensitive, brilliant, special man.  Sad to know the last text he sent to me was one of pure love, and I will never read his words, hear his voice, feel his presence again.  Sad to know he is gone when I need him the most.  

I can’t seem to delete his voicemails, his videos, his number from my speed dial.  I yearn for him, and for our ritualistic friendship.  I ache for the routine of our talks.  I find myself trying to reach out to him only to be forced to feel that emptiness as he is gone. Yet, in all this massive suffering of grief, it is not new to me.  Having lost my Daddy at a mere 12 years of age, I have a intimate relationship with loss.  I know I should be following this Kubler-Ross model and experiencing the stages of grief with gusto coupled with a bit of bravado that the armor of grief memory, like muscle memory only more acute, provides.  However, they are not linear.  They are stagnant and harsh.  The resilience I hope to embrace is out of reach.  As a mother, I must be strong and continue on.  The raw emotion I want to feel is there, bubbling under my surface, threatening to be exposed.  Yet, the value of being strong is quite misplaced as my ability to put on a happy face for my children and life only delays those stages, especially the acceptance.  Repressing the bargaining and the anger just gives ammunition to the depression.  

Yet, as I even write this, I focus on having the knowledge of the “why” and the emotional maturity of what I am feeling will propel me to heal, will allow me clarity and form some scar tissue over this deep wound.  The purest part of my heart wants desperately to have faith in the spirituality of his death.  Surely as I mourn for him, others are rejoicing to meet him again and sing praise for his life everlasting.  But such eternal joy is escapes the darker part of my heart.  The selfish part that simply wants him to call me Red again.