slowly losing pieces of something for the rest of your life

Grief is a series of small, brutal realizations.

It doesn't happen all at once but rather infiltrates aspects of your worldview so gradually that you don't notice the larger change as it's happening. It's the embezzlement of a previous way of existing. One day you wake up and realize that bits and pieces of your awareness have been flaking off flying away in the wind, unbeknownst to you, and now you're left with something that has a familiar shape and form but lacks the vital warmth of some of its insides. 

Grief is a constant war between the what if and the is. So much like that optical illusion of the vase and two faces; flickering back and forth between two modes of being - they're here, they're not, what if she's here, but she's not, but I feel him, but he's gone - a conversation between two parts of the mind, or between the heart and the mind, or between body-knowledge and thought-knowledge. A constant drop of the heart into the stomach. Hope continuously crushed by reality. 

Grief parallels the process of dying by slow disease, and dying by slow disease is a series of small mournings. In death by slow disease, you lose parts of yourself and aspects of your life and independence each day. You grieve the parts of yourself you'll never know again. I'll never dance again. I'll never see my bedroom again. I'll never bathe independently again. I'll never walk again. I'll never leave this bed again. I'll never see your face again. Slow, small deaths, that take their cruel time as they take you away from yourself, the people you love, and the life you know.

Grief is a gift. It is a testament to a love so profound that it transcends the anchor of embodied life. The feeling of the other, so alive within you, is such a painful treasure. We owe it to the dead to keep that life alive inside of us. In this way, the loss can never be complete. And though it hurts, every time the realization of loss crashes against and wars with the yearning for the lost, we discover more about ourselves, we nurture the connection between ourselves and those we've lost, and we come to a greater appreciation of those that live around us, and of life itself.