Three Months

Three months. How can it be that long already? How can it be that short? Strange how it seems like a lifetime ago that Edd passed, and yet it seems like just yesterday, all at the same time. I still surprise myself with how quickly I can go from completely normal and carrying on with my day, to a sloppy, tearful mess. Like the other day, when I walked into my mom’s house and suddenly a wave of grief washed over me, out of nowhere. Their house. The place where Edd lived. The place where I held his hand and watched him die. The place where they carried out his body for the last time. The place where his ashes returned to rest, for now. The place where there’s still a closet full of his clothes, and walls full of his memory. 
I know I’m nowhere near the end of the “grieving process.” I find myself shoving feelings down—pushing them back through the cracks when they threaten to spill out. Memories flit across my mind sometimes, especially the dying ones, and I force myself to think other thoughts, because it’s still too much.  Whenever I sit down and try to write about it, I realize how much I’m still NOT close to coming to a place of peace. I avoid this because I break down every time. I miss him. I wonder where he is. I relive those gut-wrenching last breaths—the way, just seconds before he breathed his last, he opened his eyes for the first time in days, turned his head, and looked straight into my mom’s eyes for several seconds. Like goodbye. It was electric. And then he was cold, and gone, and it’s all so final, and even though I see it in beautiful ways sometimes, other times it just feels frightening and unfair and unreal and like too much.
My mom tells me stories of this beautiful love that the two of them had. It was positively magic, and the way he planned and prepared and organized during his life is still evident now, even after he’s gone. You do that when you love someone, you know? One time he told my mom, “I’d rather have cancer and have you, then not have cancer and not have you.” Wow. I want to love like that.
So I guess on this day, exactly three months after Edd’s spirit went on from this world, I just wanted to say that we still miss you so much, Edd. Do they have Internet cafes in heaven? Can you read this, and know?  You and I never had the affectionate kind of relationship—you were brilliant and an engineer and afraid of seeming “creepy.” But I knew you loved me, and my mom would tell me things you said. Towards the end, when you really weren’t you anymore, you told me that you always wanted daughters, and now you have them, and then you laughed sheepishly. I know that was you, shining through. I love you, Edd. You make me not afraid to die. Thank you for the way you lived.