I realised that I had put a lot in place before her death so that I would be OK when she died. I knew that the end was going to be catastrophic, an absolute catastrophe, and I didn’t know how to prevent it. I knew that the tidal wave was coming for me, whether I liked it or not, and that when it came, the tidal wave would be big. I had tried to look at podcasts about grief to help me heal, and all of the advice included some iteration of “keep swimming, as huge waves are going to crash and you *will* feel you are drowning.” So I kept swimming, there was nothing else for it. And as the days get longer it starts to get better. There was a lot of water in me this year.
How many of us had to be put back together, the broken pieces?