You blame yourself, even if you did everything within your power to help them. Even if you had no idea they were struggling. Even if, deep down, you realize that you couldn’t have changed anything.
I don’t want to keep talking about you in the past tense, retelling the same old stories because there are never going to be any new ones again.
You would be making me laugh until my stomach clenched. You would be making me smile so wide that my cheeks burned. You would make my entire week, just by spending a few hours alongside me.
I alternate between loving God for placing you on this earth in the first place, for giving me the opportunity to get to know you, to become close with you, to love you — and hating Him for ripping you away from this earth so early, for not giving you the chance to grow older, for giving me a heartbreak that I will never recover from no matter how much time passes.
You are needed here. You are loved here. And once you’re in heaven, it’s going to feel like hell here.
It doesn’t matter how many years have passed, because I am always going to miss you with the same intensity. I am always going to hate how early you left this earth.
Grieving feels like being tangled up, suffocating, choking on your own emotions. It feels like a wave, a tsunami of unknown and uncertain. It feels like falling through space with nothing familiar to land on.
When you lose a cousin, you reevaluate your own life, your own mortality, because their age wasn’t that far off from yours.
It was in those moments of such despair that I learned about who I wanted to be rather than who I was.
