there's a grief that can't be spoken.

I've been staring at an empty page for a while now trying to think of a  profound, or beautiful way to put what I want to say but I think the only way I can do this justice is to just say exactly what I feel. Raw emotions, no edits, no glossing feelings over to make me look slightly less unhinged. What I'm writing is straight from the empty space where piece of my heart - that was taken away from me six years ago - used to be.

At the age of seventeen, I'd lost quite a number of people to death. But none of them could prepare me for the biggest loss of my life. There isn't a manual to tell you how to grieve, or how to cope with the loss of a loved one. I wish there was, it would make life so much easier. But that's life isn't it? Experiencing life and experiencing death. 

Nothing could have prepared me, it wasn't an expected death, not that I think that makes it any easier. No amount of time or words would have relieved or numbed the pain even in the slightest fraction. 

We spent an excruciatingly long night camped out in a tiny relatives room on 3 small sofas praying for a miracle, for the medicine to work, for anything.

But no amount of praying or wishing or hoping could have changed the outcome, the next morning, the words "there's nothing more we can do" were spoken, and the world that I knew was altered forever.

They removed the monitors and machinery keeping him alive and I held his hand and whispered in his ear. I can still feel his hand, how it felt that morning. It was different to every other time I had held his hand, this time it was lifeless, it still dwarfed my tiny hands and I knew this was the last time I was ever going to see him alive and feel the complete security and warmth that I felt every time that I grabbed his hand.

It didn't take very long, I suppose it never does. You remove the machine keeping the body alive, because the  body can't keep itself alive, and it's a waiting game of how long it can sustain itself before finally giving in. It was twenty minutes or so. I say it wasn't enough, but what amount of time would have been enough? 

I felt it instantly, a gaping hole was punched through my chest, my legs were no longer able to hold me and I fell to the floor. I'm still there now. 

I can visualise it all as though it was yesterday. And it does feel like yesterday, sometimes I hate the way my brain holds onto every painful detail, it makes the flashbacks and nightmares a lot more hard to recover from.

The pain in my chest that he left has become a normal sensation now. I don't think it will ever disappear. It aches, it burns, it hurts. This is my life now, a world in which he doesn't exist. 

It was an indescribable loss and I'm not going to sit here and try and find a collection of words that can't  even remotely articulate the emotions correctly.

One thing I can say, is that there have been times when I have felt his presence around me. As ridiculous as that may sound, there are times when I've sense him behind me, or in the room with me. His scent floods my senses and I'm immediately comforted. There was even a period of time when I felt something sit on the end of my bed each night and move a framed photograph of him and I next to my bed from another side of the room. Make of that what you will. But I take that as a sign that he still walks beside me. He may not be physically present, but for as long as I am living, he remains at my side, in my heart, and in my soul. 

I wish I could attest that "time heals everything" maybe it does. Time, that little paradox; running out by the second but on an indefinite infinite span. I have yet to be healed by time. But I have hope that I will. 

So, as we approach the night that six years ago changed my life forever. I am trying my hardest to remember the wonderful, beautiful, loving, inspirational person that he was. Not the huge gap that he left behind. I am who I am because he loved me, he taught me, he shaped me, he made me soar, and he was there when I fell.