Wherever you both are now, I hope you know I’m still loving you from here
4 yrs already.
It feels like just yesterday you two left in the same month… with just a few days apart. Sometimes I still catch myself counting the days between your last breaths, as if understanding the timeline could soften the impact. It doesn’t. That whole month feels like a torn-out chapter of my life. It was blurred at the edges, but sharp where it hurts.
I still think about how you, grandma, used to say you’d follow grandpa so he wouldn’t feel alone. At the time, it felt like one of those tender promises people make after a lifetime together, like something the heart says more than it ever expects to do. I never really believed the universe was listening, but a few days after he left, you got sick. And then you kept your word in the most heartbreaking way… you followed him. You two left almost hand in hand, just days apart, and I’m still stunned by how love held you together, even in the leaving.
There’s a selfish part of grief that wishes love could be enough to keep people here. I held onto that for a long time. I thought if I loved you deeply enough, if I stayed by your side long enough, and if I refused to picture a future without you, then somehow the universe would make an exception. That maybe, just this once, love would be stronger than time, or illness, or whatever it was that kept pulling you further away.
But love didn’t get to rewrite the ending.
Now I’m learning that loving you also meant letting you go, even when I wasn’t ready… especially when I wasn’t ready. No one prepares you for the moment when love stops looking like holding on and starts looking like loosening your grip. No one explains how an act of mercy can feel so much like betrayal.
There’s a part of me that wanted you to rage against the dying of your light. I wanted you to fight, to stay, or to push back against every dark tide that tried to pull you under. I wanted one more visit, one more story, one more conversation, one more vacation, and one more shared meal where you’d reach across the table and tell me some small detail about your day that I’d tuck away and keep forever.
But there’s another part of me that remembers how much it hurts just to stay lit. I remember the winces you tried to hide, the weariness in your eyes, and the way your body seemed more like a burden than a home. I remember how even breathing sounded like labor, how rest started to look less like surrender and more like peace.
I find it selfish of me to plead for you not to leave when you were, in fact, suffering deeply.
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Thus, I’m trying to forgive myself for wanting more time and forgive the world for not giving it. I’m learning to accept that my love was never meant to be a shield against mortality, only a soft place for you to land while you were still here. I’m trying to untangle the guilt from the gratitude, the guilt of not being able to keep you, and the gratitude that I got to love you at all.
I wanted you to stay because I loved you. I let you go because I loved you too.
Both can be true, even when they break me in different ways. One part of me is still standing in that month, begging for a different outcome. Another part of me is standing here, years later, learning to live in a world where your love is no longer something I can touch, but something I carry instead.
Four years have stretched between then and now, but my heart still folds time in on itself. Some days, the loss feels distant. Other days, it crashes over me as if it happened this morning. Grief d loops back on itself, bringing me again and again to the same doorway: the place where you were here, and then you weren’t.
On your death anniversaries, I find myself revisiting the smallest details: the way your hands looked when you held a cup, the sound of your footsteps approaching down the hall, the warmth of your hugs, and the way you said my name, like it was something beloved. I think about everything you taught me, some lessons spoken out loud and others just lived in the way you moved through the world.
I’m learning that this is what it means to keep you close now. Not by refusing to accept that you’re gone, but by letting the love we had keep shaping me, by allowing your memory to be more than just the moment of losing you, and by remembering the decades of ordinary days that came before the final one.
For you were more than your last breath. You were every story, every laugh, every gentle correction, and every shared silence. You were the warmth I leaned into without even realizing how much it was holding me up.
So, four years later, I stand here holding both truths that I wanted you to stay, and I had to let you go.
Love couldn’t keep you here, but it keeps you with me in everything I say, I do, the way I care, or even the way I still look up sometimes and whisper things I wish I could tell you.
Your light left the room, but it never really left my life. I’m still learning how to live by its afterglow.
The pain is still here, but so is the love. The years move us further from the day you left, but never from the love that keeps you here with me.
Wherever you both are now, I hope you know I’m still loving you from here.
