Life feels so different without you. I'm looking at pictures from before I knew you were dying, and how different those pictures feel! Life was completely different back then. To feel secure in the knowledge that you'd always be there--what that even feels like! But it was all denial in some sense. I always knew you had cancer. On some level, I always knew it would kill you. But, at some point, I made a conscious decision to set that knowledge aside, to forget about it for a while, so I could focus on our relationship, the real relationship that struggled to live beneath the shadow of death. I banished that shadow. And how our relationship thrived afterwards!

But now that you're gone, everything feels different. I can still feel happy on some level. I can still laugh and bounce and smile, but I'm never completely happy. Even in my happiest moments, there is a shadow over my heart. I never feel whole. There is a void in my heart, the sense that something is missing.

Grief, she is always with me. Once a complete stranger, she is now my constant companion.