if you didn't hear it the first time!

there’s a weight to grief that gratitude can’t touch. it doesn’t lift. it settles low, at the base of the spine, in places thank you’s don’t reach. maybe that’s why grief becomes ritual. not loud. not dramatic. just persistent. like the hours spent in a church long after the service ends. stillness that stretches. silence that doesn’t soften.

you sit there, listening to the stories people tell. the words they choose: wonderful, quiet, selfish. none of them feel quite right. none of them add up to a person. we grasp at meaning because we think it will anchor us. it never does.

no one asks what he might feel, if he’s near, if he watches. we talk about him like the last breath was the end of his feeling. as though dying meant detachment. no one imagines him grieving too. grieving for the things he never said. the connections he didn’t know how to make. the version of himself he couldn’t show. even in death, he’s at a distance. not absent, just not reached.

grief is louder than gratitude. more legible. easier to name. we turn inward. we inventory the loss. we rarely ask what it cost him: the holding on, the effort of staying. maybe every goodbye felt final to him long before he was gone. maybe he thought of life as a series of exits. maybe there was no thank you big enough to keep him here.

and still we wonder, if we had said more, if we had said it differently, could it have helped. not healed. just steadied. maybe gratitude is the thing that steadies. not a solution. just a hand on the railing.

there’s no undoing. no way back to the thing unsaid. but we choose what comes next. we decide how to carry the love forward. and maybe that means saying thank you before it’s too late. not out of fear. not out of habit. but because we are here. and so are they. and that matters.

thank you, we can say. to the people we love. to the ones we almost overlook. to the ones who stay, even when they don’t know why.

you sit in the pew. you wait. you feel all of it at once — the grief, the silence, the fact of your own aliveness. and for a moment, you hold it. not to understand it. just to feel it. because that’s what’s left.

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