Facebook Dispatch

December 8, 2025 at 10:44 PM 

Facebook memories has been semi-regularly coming through with images from 2 years ago. I mean, during that time, and increasingly I was saying we were doing all the things we could, with the hope we'd be able to do more. I knew, the higher part of myself knew, time was running out. The closer we got to the end, the less I would speak to that knowing. When it happened, it was so sudden. I had hoped for a longer decline, but in a lot of ways I think that is also not what he wanted.

It's been a wild week or so. Weekend before last I started shelving Jon's signed books. The ones he had collected for more than 20 years with the signatures of authors from so many genres. Some with personal inscriptions. Each one reminding me of a part and time of Jon - some I was very much there for and some that pre-date our relationship and spoke to a time of his own explorations. The grief literature I've read calls what has happened to me over the past week or so "presence" - that feeling of someone being there, though you know they aren't there, but you feel them. The yearning, the love, the chuckle, the smile, the intensity of opinion, the exasperation when interrupted from thought. All there. My heart expands and I feel him now as I type this. I don't think of it at all in a supernatural way. I even asked my tarot cards, and repeatedly it answers that what this is, this presence, is me holding on to something that is no longer here.

I have access to Jon's email going back decades. I got lost in it for a few hours. His voice so clear. I mostly was looking for his side of our story, or our story together. I was looking for him in his own words. For a few days I was consumed in a state of mild psychosis - though it's improper to call it that. I was a time traveller. I was myself, at 27 years old. Meanwhile, my synapses knitted together. You see, they say that grief is a kind of learning. They say that grief is an expression of phantom pain.

Grief is that hollow in your psyche where that love lived. All those parts of you that you weren't sure were you. All those parts of you that became the partner. The parts that became the ability to disability. Linking across a divide making you whole, the hole now left leaves a canyon with nothing so much as a rope bridge. Just flailing limbs reaching out. Desperate. Wanting. Cries echoing. The dark unbearable.

And it's the run-up to a project launch at work. On a Tuesday, sobbing again in the restroom. I sit at my computer. I stare out the window. I'm 27. I'm in a whirlwind of raw desire and love. I'm tearing myself up inside. Twenty one years later, only then would I start to understand. There was that void inside of self-doubt and shame and like the perfect empty box, Jon climbed in like a tuxedoed cat finding home.

They say grief is a kind of yearning.

Or rather piece after piece will try to assure you that "it's totally normal" and "many people feel ashamed... but you don't have to be!" Widow's Fire, they call it. Where your bed is cold and empty, no amount of heating pads or pillows or weighted blankets will soothe it. If you told me I'd been secretly given a low dose of psilocybin and 2-CB I'd find my more recent states believable.

The sensation of my current state of grief is electric extending from the deepest part of the physical and extending out. Out. I fold in the hollow, my face soaked, somewhere lost in 2006, maybe 2008. A friend places their hands on my shoulders and I'm shaken awake into a melting desire to have my soul crushed back into my body.

I unlock my phone. I swipe right

What will soothe this ache?

I check another app.

I see a friend is sick.

Can't I have a break?

I lay in bed with my laptop. I swore I would stop bringing it to bed but I needed to type this out. It's late. 10:37pm. Time for bed. I don't sleep much these days. Tomorrow I take another barre class. Each time I hope that it will allow some of this electricity to dissipate. I'll do it again on Thursday. Saturday morning is yoga. We leave Sunday for NY.

They say that grief is the only time in your life where you can be forgiven.

And they say grief will not last forever.

But it will last forever.

But it won't always feel the same.