Grief

20 years ago yesterday, my first boyfriend died. He was no longer my boyfriend, in fact he was in love with and the boyfriend of someone else, but I was still shattered. Not only because he was dead, but because everyone around me was shattered too.

I had just dug myself out of a deep depression that plagued my freshman year of college and I became obsessed with figuring out why he had died. I felt like knowing whether he'd done it on purpose or by accident would make the grief easier to bear. It wasn't that we'd talked, away at our separate colleges before cell phones and Facebook. It was just him not being there, him not being a possibility in my future, him not off doing amazing things, that I couldn't handle.

Now my friend has been gone longer than he was here.

There's a tiny part of me that's still shattered. Not for myself, but for his parents, his girlfriend, his best friends and all the people who didn't get to know him. And for him, most of all.

That's the thing no one ever told me about grief. It shrinks, yes, but it also morphs. Maybe into a grief that's more bearable, maybe into art or anger or whatever. But I guess I'd always thought that someday it would shrink so much that I couldn't feel it anymore. But on the 20th anniversary of my friend's wake, I know that's not true.