Years go by. Days, months, life events. Before you know it, you have been living with the death of your person for almost 13 years. It goes by in a flash, and also, excruciatingly slow. Life goes on, as they say. But sometimes what really sucks is that the constant death of your person also goes on. It’s not like one day it finally stops, or like you can look forward to a day when they will come back or somehow return. So you live the best way you know how, and you just keep on missing them.

Some days this missing falls into the background of everyday life. Other times, for no particular reason or for every single reason, the volume button on the missing of them is so high, it breaks off. It breaks off and falls into the palm of your hand, where it sits and sits as you listen to the screaming noise of how much you wish they were here.

That is how I feel today. No particular reason. Or many reasons. Who the hell knows anymore. Grief triggers grief, and there’s a lot going on right now in my life, and there is a lot of sadness happening. There is uncertainty. There is hurt, and changes coming that are not necessarily welcome or by choice. And those kinds of things always make me miss Don, mostly because I just need one of his hugs. I need for him to tell me it will all be okay eventually, and I need for him to believe in me in the way that he does, and to be in awe of me in the way that he is. Or was. I need him to be my biggest cheerleader right now, and I need for him to help me crawl through all of this upcoming pile of absolute disaster area and cluster. I need his patience, his humor, and his amazing ability to let things fall away, not hold onto resentments, and face really hard things with incredible ease and grace. I need ALL OF THAT from him right now, so I guess I will have to channel those parts of him into me, somehow, and do my best. But it’s not the same, and I really wish he was here.

I miss you so very much, Don Shepherd. I always, always will.