Ten Years Gone*

10 years today. I've written so much about Amir over the years, yet today I can't find the right words. Marking 10 years is no different from 9 years or 11 years or 50 years - my heart aches as profoundly today as it did from the first day we were forced to live without you and it will never not ache. Grief does NOT get easier. My brain may have become accustomed to not seeing you, not talking to you, not making plans with you, not sharing our day-to-day lives. But your absence never gets easier to accept. Days go by with no tears, but they are always just underneath the surface, waiting for the simplest trigger to coax them out. (Usually a random song playing in a supermarket, or a '70s-model car rolling by, or the merest mention of Sesame Street or Star Wars, or the enlightenment gained from a music podcast or documentary that I'd give my left arm to be able to share with you.)

Listening this morning to music you loved that recalls so many memories of how we'd listen together, on the floor in front of the stereo, in the car on road trips, in the backyard, at parties with childhood friends and cousins. Recalling you dancing around the living room as a kid, mistaking lyrics, calling me into the den in MTV's infancy, sitting rapt on the couch as we embraced the exciting new frontier of music videos and waited impatiently for our favorites to air.

If I could lock away all my memories of you in a safe place that I would always be able to access without any fear of them fading as time moves forward, I would pay any money to do so.

I've aged 10 years without you here, visible and mental signs of which have been accelerated by your loss and the giant hole it has left in our lives. And yet somehow we go on without you and will continue to do so, diminished at times but also grateful and emboldened to make the most of this life.

*one of many Led Zeppelin songs Amir loved (as do I)

Crumbs of Peace

Isn't that a lovely term? "Crumbs of peace." A fellow member of my bereaved siblings group uses this term to describe little signs and winks she receives from her dead sister. Those of us who have lost someone so precious to us find comfort in our own "signs" that they are near - a particular bird, a song on the radio, a feather drifting past, a flicker of lights, a penny or other coin found on the street. For me, the first of these signs came on New Year's Eve, 2015 - one year after Amir's death and only 5 months after Jason's - when a framed photo I have of the two of them that rested on a bookcase in my old apartment suddenly hurled itself from the shelf and landed at my feet as I glanced it while walking past. No joke. I don't believe in an afterlife or anything like that, but in that moment, I felt like the two of them were either (a) fucking with me for a laugh, or (b) letting me know they loved me and were still with me. That is a crumb of peace, which I cherish.

It's April again, a month that should include celebrating Amir's birthday WITH HIM and not just sadly imagining who he would have been. I don't need a birthday to celebrate him - I do this in my own way every fucking day. He should have been 48 this year. I'm sure I'll want to write on the 7th, but for now, it's Monday and work beckons.

Still, I awoke feeling mournful, the "Aprilness" setting in - that familiar sadness that creeps in at the start of a season so ripe with blooming and rebirth. Grieving feels infinitely heavier when life is blossoming all around. It's a heaviness that's hard to express to anyone who's not experienced it.

Since Amir's death, one of my most treasured possessions has been his blue/green hoodie, which I have worn only at home but nearly every day in the chill of the fall-winter-spring months. (I think it’s the one he’s wearing in the photo.) It no longer smelled like him or even like his cigarettes; still, washing it for the first time was painful, as if I was erasing him in some way. Sadly, my precious piece of Amir has become so worn out that I decided to retire it before it lost its former shape completely. 

Amir's hoodie is now carefully folded and resting in a box filled with letters, cards and other trinkets from Amir – the box that means more to me than anything else in my home. My own crumb of peace.