A post without a title

I couldn't think of a good title for this post, as it's about a subject that can't be neatly summed up. I decided to write last weekend about the ragged-ended emotions brought by bereavement and grief, but I couldn't get it right, and so I've waited until today to try again. It's not something easy to put into sentences and paragraphs, and I find when I write that I'm drawn to neat openings, middles and ends - a natural pastiche-maker all my life, I find that writing honestly about deep feelings slips and slides and eludes me. It's so easy to say something that's not really true but just sounds right. Not so easy to express the real experiences of deep emotion.
Recently grief entered my life - three months ago, when someone close to me died after being gradually robbed of his health over three months. The loss of someone, the realisation that this person, this physcial body you could hold in your arms, is simply gone, and gone forever, is too strange to take in. Grief is a physical experience, a weight that sits on your chest, crushing the air from your lungs. It literally winds you. It exhausts you.
But all around me, I see indisputable signs of life and growth. Reminders that lives end and begin all the time, unstoppably. It's high summer, and the first flowers of spring have faded and gone to seed, while roses and hydrangeas are in their full regalia, and all the soft fruits that taste of summer itself are weighing down the bushes in the pick-your-own farm we go to. And, just like every year, by the time I really accept that it is summer, snatches of autumn will be in the air. And it will all begin again and again, whether I'm here to see it or not.
None of these thoughts are new or revelatory. But I think it's only when you lose someone that the truth of the relentless life cycles that surround us strikes home. And when the weight of sadness that presses the air from my body subsides, and I look around me at the world in its uncountable diversity and splendour, I have to lean back, let the sun warm my face, and enjoy what we have, while we have it.