A moment from On the Shores of Grief

There are days grief arrives without warning.
Not like a thought, but like a weight already within me.

I would wake and reach for a life that no longer answered back.

He is not here.

The world continued anyway.
Unbothered. Unchanged.
As if nothing sacred had been interrupted.

But everything inside me knew otherwise.

Time felt different after that.
Thicker. Slower. Unreliable.

And in the middle of it, something else began to surface.
Not loudly or clearly.
But persistently—like something just beyond the edge of sight.

A sense that what I could hold in my hands was not everything there was.

That this life—its endings, its limitations, its ache—was not the final reality.
That there was something more solid than what I could see, even as everything visible felt like it was fading.

It wasn’t imagination.
And it wasn’t escape.

It felt like awareness.

Like heaven was not distant, but nearer than I had ever known how to notice—
not replacing grief, but existing alongside it in a way I couldn’t ignore.

Not as a place I was trying to reach,
but as a reality pressing gently against the edges of this one.

I didn’t have language for it.
Only knowing.

And it did not take the grief away.
It moved beside it.

Loss in one hand.
Something eternal in the other.
Neither letting go.

And I am still learning how to live there.