I am my heart’s undertaker. It is a full time job. Before, I never really thought about how often a heart could break, about what work it was to tend to a heart that has been mangled.
I watch Shifu chase after a squirrel and think about how it would make you laugh, and my heart breaks.
I hear about a new true-crime podcast or TV show and think about how excited you would be, and my heart breaks.
The beauty of the full moon shining through our maple tree’s limbs, covered in spring buds, fills my heart; yet because you’re not here to see it with me, my heart breaks.
I have a difficult day at work that I want to tell you about, and my heart breaks.
I snuggle Elvis as he recovers from a bout of pneumonia and as I think about how the last time he had it, you were with us, my heart breaks.
I walk around the home that we made together, seeing the curtains we picked out and the kitchen you were so proud of me for making functional, and the tea-corner next to our Harry Potter closet that we fell in love with, and my heart breaks.
I look at the shadowbox I made of our son’s hand and footprints, the blanket that the hospital gave us, the tiny knit cap they put on his head for pictures, the date of his delivery (I still find I cannot say birth… since he was born still, and the word birth feels wrong on my fingers and my lips), and my heart breaks.
I am here, trying to live without you. I still see beauty and joy in the world, but my grief is still so ever present. My heart pumps blood through my body, but each day it dies a little death because you are no longer a part of this world, at least not the plane I am living in.
So I find myself walking this delicate balance – trying to breathe and feel life around me, trying to be a part of the world, and also serving as undertaker to my heart that dies a little each day. I have to tend to it, recognize its state, it’s tattered presence. I hold it, and honor it. And then I box it up… and somehow the next day, I do it all again.