Grieving.

My life is suffused by loss and grief. I am weighted down by this loss, this absence. The death of someone I love. I am not ready to use the past tense. I feel the weight of this grief like a solid metal shape held inside my torso by hooks which dig into my flesh inside my body yet do not give way, releasing this burden, instead they continue to rip at me, unexpected sharp pains, while the weight remains, pulling me down, making it hard to move, to think, to do anything. It is bearable and unbearable, concrete and intangible, unbelievable yet constantly, grindingly, blindingly real. I know it will get better and worse, it will change, as it is changing, minute by hour, week by day, I know the loss will become more and less. I am frightened of how much bigger it will become. And frightened of it shrinking and losing some of this love, this presence in absence. I am grieving. I am mourning. I am surviving death.

I feel the personal loss bound up in larger losses, the grief of thousands, and of individuals. In Israel and Palestine, in Ukraine, in all the other conflicts, the deaths from hunger and disease, the other kind of grief from Parnell Square, the violence, the murders. For the planet as another COP begins, overseen by the head of an oil company in an oil-rich countr. The grief for us all. It makes this personal loss much harder.

I know my grief is 'normal'. I know many others go through similar, have gone through similar, very recently, very similarly. I have the good people and the people I love and who love me around. Everyone and everything is not lost. I know it is in some way ok and will be ok even though it is also not ok. Nothing like ok. I am grieving too for the past, for the things not done, the time wasted, the losses inflicted on me and that I gave away. I am grieving the present, what isn't here, who isn't here, the absence in my now. And I am grieving the future I will not have, the futures other people I love will not have, that can never be, that I wanted and wished for and looked forward to and lived in the presumption of. I am grieving in three tenses. I am not ready to use the past tense.