Love is watching someone die.

Every time I thought I had accepted the fact it was happening, that it was real, that I could see you diminishing in size and life in front of my very own eyes, a smile on your face would send me reeling back into confusion. I don’t understand a reality where I will exist without you. They say the worst is over, knowing you were in pain, knowing there wasn’t a single thing I could do, letting you go… It has been done. You took your last breath and the pressure of your hand in mine disappeared and months of supposedly preparing for this went up in smoke. I cried until I went blind and even when the tears stopped pouring there was a constant ache behind my eyes, a giant hole in my chest that made me gasp for breath. With every lungful of air I struggle to take in, I am only reminded that I am still here while you are not. My love, my heart, the one who made me laugh, held my hand, danced with me, shared a billion memories with me that keep playing in my head, a cruel reminder that you are no longer physically here with me. You would hold me when my temper overtook my rationality, tighten your embrace until there was no more fight in me. There is no more fight in me. Who will hold me now? I don’t think I ever told you enough times that I loved you, that I was crazy about you, that you were and are the most wonderful person I have ever known. You were My person. And now I will never again hear your voice or see you smile mischievously, or feel you next to me. It kills me. I am in a haze of pain and hurt and the rare times that the waves of unending sorrow let up I am somehow surprised that nothing has stopped. Life goes on while I remain trapped in an existence where everything is gray and pale and slow. Everything hurts.

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Death is something we all deal with. Someone loses their entire world every minute of every day. It doesn’t comfort any of us to know this. All we understand and experience is a broken heart, an incomplete existence, a sense of injustice at the futility of it all.

In the end, this is what we are. Alone.