1,962 days.

And I used to think I couldn’t get through one.

I don’t know what asked me to open Google this morning and type the words:

“How many days since 18 nov 2020?”

But I did.

Grief is a kaleidoscope that skews the lens of time. A collage of days, cropped & angled, cut & crumpled. My mind cannot fathom that I am standing on the altar of the sixth year without her, when my heart still stands next to her sterile bed, under unforgiving fluorescent light, holding her cold hand one last time.

But my screen tells me it’s been 1,962 days since the darkest one of my life.

It feels both momentous and cruel to know that we do survive, that we carry on, that we move forward through the current of time that continuously asks us to drift further away from the one we lost. But we do, we survive.

For every version of me that never thought we’d make it through the next day:

It’s been 1,962 days. You have survived every single one. And you even found joy along the way.