While I’m not there yet, I’m starting to gather an ongoing metaphor for how I’m doing.

Because I’m good a lot of days, but I’m busy. My work’s hectic season is here and I’m also doing my best to purposefully burn the candle at both ends so I don’t completely lose the tiny semblance of a social life that I have while events szn is in full swing. Which means my grief is never far away. I’m naturally nearsighted so if my grief (even metaphorically) is further than about three feet, I have to squint to see it.

But lately, it’s creeping up on me, and I find myself thinking “you’re not quite out of the woods yet.”

So I came up with this. [And by come up with this, I mean someone else definitely already has, because if Tik Tok has taught me anything, it’s that I’ve never once had an original thought.]

The sudden death of someone you love is like walking through the forest, on an normal day, on a trail you take all the time, when a sinkhole opens in front of you. The ground shakes and you jump back just in time to have the earth completely crumble into a massive hole, deeper than you can see, into blackness. With it every tree, shrub, flower and spec of dust around the sinkhole falls into the dark. You stand there for a few minutes in shock, trying to figure out what the hell just happened. By the time you come back to reality, everything in the forest feels different. Light comes in at different angles, and the hiking trail is interrupted in the middle. People start walking past you on their own trails as if nothing is different. Can’t they see the massive hole!? Can’t they see all the trees are gone!?

For a while you keep coming back to that hole. Maybe you can throw things down into it to see how deep it goes, so you can retrieve some of the forest within it, but no matter how long the rope, it’s never long enough. You realize you’ll ever find the bottom so you give up trying, and instead, start planting seeds along the edge of the sinkhole. 

Tiny sprouts come up, slowly, slowly, slowly, so you start to take the trail again like you always do, just moving around the sinkhole the best you can. After a long while, the tiny sprouts start to cover the edges. New bushes and flowers grow and you can’t see the sinkhole every time you pass. You know it’s there. Some days you’re looking up instead of at your feet and oops, almost fall in. You can still…sense that it’s there, but you’ve carved a new path around it that gets more and more weathered each day. 

Eventually, I think the trees will probably grow so tall I can’t see the sinkhole. I’ll still know it’s there, marked by the path of the old trail still carved into the forest floor and the trees that are so much younger than the old growth, but I’m pretty sure that, without thinking, I’ll instinctively walk the new path. 

Eventually.