The world goes on and on and on....

The hardest part of grief, for me, is that fact that the world does not stop. Laundry still needs to be done, traffic still makes you late for work, mail gets delivered and ignored. Everything just keeps going. And with everything that lives and breathes, there are ounces of pain because the one you lost is no longer here.

When I first started teaching, my grandmother found out that tissues are not included in school supplies paid for by the school. So she took it on as her mission, to provide tissues for my class. "English class is hard enough, what if a kid is crying about it?" She used to joke. So every time I saw her, she supplied me with 5-10 boxes of tissues, "for the kids." About 8 months after she died, I was grocery shopping and turned down the papergoods isle. And as soon as I saw the tissues, I burst into tears. Spontaneous grief. And the shoppers near me kept shopping, continuing with their regular Tuesday. And in that instance I realized my grandmother would never buy me tissues ever again. Bam! Grief Mack Truck, right there in the tissue isle. And that's the thing about grief - you never know when it's going to hit you - because the losses we experience never go away, they just get buried beneath the grind of the day to day.

Last week, I had to pay for parking at the local children's hospital (everyone's fine, don't worry). And as I was paying, I had the horrifying thought. Do people whose child has died still have to pay for parking when they leave the hospital? And what a horrible thing. To think that you've just had the greatest loss you'll ever experience and then someone asks you for a ticket and to pay $4.00 for your time - as though you haven't lost enough. Because the world keeps moving. Nothing stops just because your personal world collapsed. Parking still costs money, students still need tissues, and life, as everyone else knows it - just keeps going on.