Grief dulls the happy moments, pulling you down into the darkness.
I tried so hard to pull myself out of the depression that followed the overwhelming weight of it all. I wasn’t grieving just one loss—I was grieving him, our child, and the future we would never have. It felt like trying to stand while the ground beneath me kept giving way.
In the quiet moments, I wrote to him. Letter after letter, pouring my heart and soul onto paper. It was the only way I knew how to keep loving him, the only place I could still speak to him and pretend, even for a moment, that he might hear me.
Around the end of April, his parents invited the kids and me to visit their home. His dad grilled lunch, something warm and familiar. The kids laughed and played, chasing each other outside and giggling as they followed around their cat, a beautiful Persian with her tongue always slightly out, as if she, too, didn’t quite take life too seriously.
For a moment, it almost felt normal.
His mom gently walked us through his room. Time had paused there. Books lay open, notebooks spread across his desk with a pen resting as if he had just stepped away. His bed was still unmade. The faint scent of his cologne lingered in the air. And there, hanging on the back of his chair, was his favorite green jacket.
It took everything in me not to fall apart in that room.
The afternoon was filled with both warmth and ache—the kind that sits just beneath the surface of every smile. When it was time to leave, his mom pulled me into a tight embrace and whispered, “Thank you for letting us meet your children, and seeing a side of Paul that we never knew about.”
I could feel the weight behind her words. The quiet pride. The deep, unspoken grief. She was mourning not only the son she lost, but the life he never got to fully live—the father he had only just begun to be.
When we left their home, we stopped to visit him.
Everything felt still there, as if the world itself had softened its voice. The kids stayed close to me, their small hands finding mine. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know if anything I said would ever be enough.
I told him we came.
I told him about the day.
I told him the kids were happy—for a little while.
I stood there trying to understand how someone who once filled so much space in my life could now be reduced to silence. This place held what was left of him, but not his laughter, not his warmth, not the way he once looked at me like I was home.
The kids said their goodbyes in their own simple, honest way. And somehow, that made it even harder.
Before we left, I lingered just a little longer. Long enough to say the things that still live inside me. Long enough to hope, just for a moment, that somehow, he could hear me.
As we walked away, I realized something I had been fighting to accept:
Grief doesn’t end at the grave.
It follows you home.
It sits beside you in the quiet.
It lives in the love that has nowhere to go… except to remain.
And maybe that’s what grief really is…love that refuses to disappear.
Ebbs & Flows 