The trade off.

Last night i met my wonderful bookclub friends to discuss my boyfriends novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. (Johnathan Safran Foer is not really my boyfriend. Well he is in my head, but not in real life.)

Of course we talked about 9/11, we talked about parenting and metaphors and human relationships. And we talked about grief. At one point, my sister mentioned that her grief counsellor had said something poignant on the subject recently. I hope she doesn't mind me sharing it here. The essence of the statement was that grief does not go away. You never "Get over it." It changes and it changes you. It makes you numb and makes you feel. It doesn't go away though. The main thing about grief is that it serves as a reminder that you once loved someone very much, and then they died.

The dying part is not the important part of that statement. The loving part is. It is not as simple as I loved her for two years=i cried everyday for five. Or she told me she loved me on my wedding day=I will never marry anyone again to honor that. The ways in which you grieve are not a reflection on how much you loved. The fact that you grief is. Or the fact that you cannot grieve is. Either way, you loved.

And isn't that what this tiny and huge life is all about? That capacity to find pockets within our souls to keep those precious parts in? The people, the smiles, the mishmash of memories? When i finally die, be in tomorrow or in 75 years, i hope my heart looks like an advent calendar with endless windows. And behind each one would be things like "The time i held my niece for the very first time" and "the way "I love you" sounds in Welsh." Somewhere in amongst it all will be "I once loved a man so deeply and passionately that when his heart broke, i gave him half of mine" and "I finally forgive you."
And each little window will close one by one and noone will ever be able to take those things away or change them. They will exist forever. They already exist forever.