The Weight I Carry for You

The world shatters again, another name taken by their own hand carved into the quiet,
the air goes thin, the sound bends, and sorrow arrives like a tide,
not slow, but immediate, a hollow expanding where something bright used to be.
I feel it first as emptiness, a quieter heartbeat, a space that holds more silence,
then the heat of anger, sharp and guilty, rising and confusing,
anger at whatever broke them, anger at the part of me that wonders why I didn’t pull harder,
the endless chorus of what ifs echoing like unanswerable prayers.

Could I have shown up sooner?
Returned that call?
Sat longer?
Held the weight of their quiet a little more?
Those questions stretch like old scars, tender and unhealed.
A quiet inner voice reminds me we are all carrying unseen burdens,
the broken threads of others’ stories woven into our own,
and somewhere an echo of scripture lingers, love covering a multitude of wounds,
not erasing, but slowly, slowly softening the edges.

Grief, I have learned, is not a single season,
it is a long, crooked path where anger and guilt and sorrow take turns guiding your steps,
until love, quiet and stubborn, begins to come back,
not replacing the loss, but settling beside it.
Months become years, the weight shifts,
and the sharp questions dull into something like acceptance,
yet the memory remains, fierce and tender.

I know now the darkness that claimed them is one we all skirt at times,
that the load of living, the fraying of hope, the unseen battles,
they make a common language, a bridge of recognition.
So to those I’ve lost, I say this,
I’ve got you,
in the remaining miles, in the small breaths of each day,
I will bear what you could not,
I will carry your stories, your laughter, your silence,
they are stitched into me, and I will walk forward with them.

The burden is not a chain but a compass,
it points me toward others, toward listening, toward showing up.
Your absence sharpens my presence,
your ending becomes, paradoxically, a kind of fuel.
Hope, once thin as mist, thickens now,
not naive, but forged from the knowing that even broken hearts can hold more light.

So I keep going,
not to forget, but to honor,
to build, from the fractures, something that endures.
The next sunrise is a small, stubborn promise,
and I will meet it, carrying you with me.