Dear — what do I call you?

You’re my closest friend and my oldest enemy. I know you better than I know myself; I’ve run away but never left. I’ve held onto you for quite some time. 

It started with Dada (my grandpa), the man who practically raised me alongside my parents, but that wasn’t enough. You had to take more. One by one, you made me tired of funerals and saying goodbye to the people I love, because every goodbye was just another hello to you.

For the longest time, I thought keeping you around meant keeping him alive. I didn’t want to heal because I thought the pain was the last bond I had with him. I thought grieving the loss was all I had left to remember the love. Whether it was staring at the empty side of his bed and feeling my heart break at every glance, or eating his favorite foods because someone had to finish them before they went bad. I thought the little glimpses of everything I had lost was the only way to remember everything I once had, so I held onto you. 

I used to think I didn’t deserve to sit on his side of the bed laughing with my family because how could I laugh in the same room he took his last breath in? Who was I to finish plates he never got to hold? 

I held onto everything you brought with you. I wasn’t ready to let you go because the idea of endless, grieving pain seemed easier to live with than living without him. 

Holding onto you came naturally because you made me let go of so much. I didn’t just lose him that day. I lost me, too — not to some higher power or a deadly disease like cancer, but to you. 

As I watched him take his last breath and the life leave his body, I felt you take over mine. You moved in as soon as he moved on.  

It’s been almost five years, and we’ve only gotten closer. We have more to bond over, more memories to remember and endless loss of love to cherish. But in the time we’ve spent getting to know each other better, I’ve finally figured out how to understand you.

You aren’t just defined by the moments where I have to count our family as a group of five instead of six, or when I’m cutting my birthday cake, turning to give Dada the first bite only to see that he’s not standing next to me. You were there when I was watching my entire family dance in the living room of our rental house in Florida — on Dada’s dream vacation that he couldn’t live to see. You were also there when I went to Dada’s grave and told him I got into the University of Texas at Austin and when my family started crying at the first word of a song that reminded us of him. 

It took me a few years to realize that in return to you taking everything, I found myself again. You lived in me until I could find my way to live and — for that — I’ll forever be grateful because despite what you took, you taught even more. I thought pain was proof of love but turns out, it was just the echo of loss — love doesn’t have to hurt to be real; he loved me here, so I’ll learn to stay. 

I kept you so I could keep him, and although you’ll always walk beside me, I’ve learned how to lead now. You put me through unimaginable pain, but you also showed me that it’s OK to live in the universe that he loved me so deeply in. 

I couldn’t add days to his life, but he would want me to add life to my days.   

With love and loss, 

Your forever friend