The Price We Pay For Love

7-27-2013


Grief is the price we pay for love
Queen Elizabeth II

About four years ago I wrote a post about grief for Four Perspectives, the first blog I was involved with.  In that post I wrote about coming up on the first anniversary of my husband's death. I wrote about how fast life moves on after someone leaves us and about  how grief, though painful and profound, is the proof that someone was really there.

Before Four Perspectives, I'd never been too sure about blogs.  I mean there were some blogs that my friends wrote that I followed and I enjoyed - I just wasn't sure that anything I was doing was interesting enough to blog about.  But my friend Jason convinced me that I was a good enough writer, or at least that I had a skewed enough perspective on the world to be interesting enough at least some of the time and invited me to write on his new blog.  The best part being that on Four Perpectives, I wouldn't have to carry the load of being interesting all by myself because, as the name suggests, there were four people writing.

After awhile Jason convinced me it was time to have a blog of my own, if only to expand my own skewed view of the world a little more.  And it was almost a year ago exactly that Jason helped me set up this very blog.  We came up with the name and he helped me pick a preliminary design and taught me how to navigate around a little bit.  You may notice though that even though it's been a year, this is actually my first post on "To Mel and Back."  This is largely because the day after Jason helped me set up this blog, a series of events began to unfold that ended in the death of my friend.  It was a sudden and troubling death that I'm not sure that any of his friends will ever fully be able to deal with.  So even though I finally had a blog of my own, I just didn't have the heart for it. I couldn't really come to this page without dealing with the grief of my friend's passing and I was not finding much comfort in those feelings or memories and just didn't want to write it out.

But a year has passed.  A year without Wednesday dinners with my friend, a year without talking (and complaining) about our jobs, a year without comparing photographs, songs, movies,vacations, sorrows, blessings, accomplishments and basically being a witness to each other's lives.  I didn't have the heart to write it all down this year and I'm still not sure that I do. But I do know that not writing hasn't helped me feel better, and I've been thinking lately that Jason would be really, really mad that I haven't been writing - especially since the last thing he did for me was help me set up this blog because he, at least, enjoyed my writing.

So I think it's time to write again  - it's time because life does move on.  Even though I have had sorrows this year, I have also had accomplishments and blessings. I am building new friendships, renewing old ones and I had the most interesting vacation of my life.  I'd love to be able to tell Jason all about it because I know he'd be excited for me.  And maybe, in a way, I will be.