Grief is grey and damp, a marshland of emotions that suck you in, tendrils of mist that caress you, asphyxiate you.Grieving is the journey you do alone, a penitence, a pilgrimage, an affirmation of being alive in the face of death that shadowsus, every waking moment. Grief was the country I was on apilgrimage within, searching for redemption from my grieving.

What stung were the tears that dripped unbidden into the ruptured skin. They were salty, a familiar taste of distilled sorrow. When they mixed with blood, they created a potion for grief, that when swallowed, could drown her in a morass of darkness from which it would take her days to emerge.

Miss was a word that couldn’t quite express the hollow pit of my stomach filled with nothing but cold gusts of air where the intestines should have been, walking around with a gaping hole in my chest where my heart had been pulled out from, feeling hollow within and without. It was a missing that filled me up, an absence that was a presence, a bereavement that wasn’t a release.

How did other women come to terms with losing a husband? Did they pick up the pieces of their shattered selves and gluethem back together, sealing the joints with metal to prevent them from falling apart again at the slightest whiff of remembrance, motes of a residual ghost perfume, familiar and overwhelmingin a just-vacated elevator, a familiar stretch of shoulder and head in a distance, in a crowd, snatches of a song that had beenplaying when….

Grief isn’t elegant. It is messy, snot-nosed, feral, aching. A beast that slobbers into one’s sane moments and scratches the door of one’s composure insistently, demanding to be let out.