I feel like in our society, there’s a specific set of steps that are expected to get us through grief. I’m not talking about the stages of grief, I’m talking about the actions that push us along. It’s different for every death, but for me, it’s supposed to go something like this; funeral, relocation, grad school, new career, with remarriage apparently thrown in there somewhere (that’s another topic for another post), then poof, happiness. People take these as signs that you’ve gotten closure, you’re moving on. They’re not.

The thought of closure is terrifying. I don’t want closure, I don’t want to move on. I want to continue living my life and bettering myself, but I want to hold on to it all. I want to always miss him, because he deserves to be missed, every day, for the rest of my life. Moving on is not missing him. Moving on is forgetting.

I keep picturing myself as an old woman, sitting and remembering him as he was, feeling just as much pain as I do now. More, even, because of the life that I lived without him and the things he never got to do on earth and what a tragedy it was to lose him. There is no magic switch that happens when you get closure or you move on, and I wouldn’t flip it anyway.