INTENT
I know that grief is transient - perhaps not short-lived, but certainly not a permanent state of existence. According to everything I read and everyone I speak to, grief is something you naturally build around rather than something you can intentionally move away from. I wouldn’t want to move away from it, anyway, when my grief is what keeps her closest. Is that selfish? Trying to keep her close? She needed to leave. She didn’t want to, but - in those last days - she felt that she needed to. Holding onto her does, honestly, feel a little selfish whenever I consider that.I could write about her forever, I think. Not just about her, perhaps; about me, in relation to her, and about us. The feelings I had, have, will have. There are days now when I lack the words to say anything about anything, and days where I have so very many words that I’m tripping over myself in my desperation to scribe it all down, to let it all out, to put - into something tangible, readable, absorbable - what is happening in my head and my heart.There’s a word I love, which I think perfectly encapsulates what Steph is, and will always be, to me: indelible. You cannot love someone to such degrees, give as much as you have in you, put as much of yourself as you possibly can into someone and something and it not, in some way, be a permanent fixture in your experience. When love is so intentional - and it was painfully, ardently, determinedly and vibrantly intentional, every day - it’s a ridiculous expectation to think that, one day, the mark left by that love would and could disappear.Even if it could fade, love - at least the kind I believe in - is a verb. I don’t want anyone to ever feel loved passively by me. I want to love with intent, with action, with clarity that cannot be doubted.Most days at the moment, my love looks like pain, grief displayed in sobs as I try to catch my breath: whimpers, endless and loud sound into cushions and pillows and anything soft which can hold the weight of it. But there are, blissfully, moments when that love feels and displays as it did whilst she lived: a warmth which demands to be voiced aloud in an ‘I love you’. Holding her ashes in my arms, gently swaying as I rock her back and forth in a longing attempt to comfort her, and to comfort myself. A smile I don’t even realise is creeping across my face as I remember something we shared, or something she did. A laugh in the silence of our home, half-formed because hers is not there to join it.Time hasn’t passed quickly enough for it to have made a dent in the loss of her - if anything, it only grows - but I feel all of it with as much intent as I did the presence of her in life. Loving her intentionally - grieving her intentionally - is the only thing which makes sense to me at the moment.I want everything to be intentional.
LW
March 2025
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