I forced a smile.

“It’s okay.”

But it wasn’t okay.

That’s the strange thing about grief.

People expect it to become easier to talk about over time.

Sometimes it actually becomes harder because everyone else moves on while you’re still carrying it every day.

After brunch, I sat in my car for nearly twenty minutes before driving home.

I cried over something ridiculous.

A voicemail.

I still had one saved from three years ago.

“Hi sweetheart, just checking on you. Call me when you wake up.”

That was it.

Eleven seconds.

I’ve listened to it so many times I know exactly when her voice cracks slightly on the word sweetheart.

I can’t delete it.

I know someday technology will fail and I’ll lose it forever.

That thought terrifies me more than I can explain.

The older I get, the more afraid I become of forgetting tiny things about her.

The exact sound of her laugh.

The way her hugs felt.

Her perfume.

Her handwriting.

Grief isn’t just mourning someone’s absence.

It’s the panic of realizing memories fade no matter how desperately you try to preserve them.

That afternoon I opened the closet where I keep some of her old things.

Her cardigan still hung there.

Soft gray fabric.

I buried my face into it searching for traces of her scent.

Nothing.

That destroyed me more than I expected.

Because somewhere along the way, the fabric stopped smelling like my mother and started smelling like nothing.

That’s the cruelty nobody prepares you for.

The world keeps moving.

Objects lose their scent.

Voicemails distort.

People stop mentioning them because they think it hurts you.

And slowly, it feels like the universe is erasing evidence they were ever here at all.

I sat on my bedroom floor holding that cardigan and finally let myself break.

Really break.

Not the controlled tears you cry quietly in bathrooms.

Not the dignified grief people are comfortable witnessing.

I mean ugly grief.

The kind where breathing hurts.