Next Monday will mark a year since Shefa died.

These are the reasons I survived his death:
– My daughter
– The transformative, overwhelming acts of love and care I have received
– My family and my ancestors
– Miracles

This last week is so precious to me. Each day from now until next Monday is the last day I can say: last year on this day I was doing *this* with Shefa. And because it was our last week, each day is rubbed clear and bright in my memory. After the week is over, it will be over a year since I last held him, slept next to him, played with him, nursed him. It will be over a year since I was a person who took my children surviving me for granted, and over a year since I lived with an un-shattered heart. After this week is over, the memories of the past year will be ones of failed resuscitation attempts, of holding his lifeless body, of preparing him to become ashes, of grief and torment and survival.

And four weeks from today he will, from that day forward and for the rest of my life, have been dead for longer than he was alive.

Part of me is sad and afraid to pass these markers. I can’t bear him being farther away from me than he already is. It’s the smell of him evaporating from his clothes, his grubby little fingerprints being slowly, one by one, wiped and polished from our furniture. The last wisps of the last traces of his planetary existence disappearing.

*****

Somehow over this year I’ve learned how to live with a broken heart.

And I am at a point where I don’t think broken hearts heal. Perhaps the breaks are held together with veins of gold, elevated as places of beauty as in the Japanese art of Kintsugi. Or perhaps the breaks are where the light gets in, as sings Leonard Cohen. But though I’ve learned again to go through the day, to see a beautiful tree, to laugh with my friends, to sleep at night, and to hear and choose clearly the insistence of my need to remain alive, the pain of my loss does not seem to be going anywhere.

I think I’m simply learning to have a place for it. It’s in a bag I carry maybe, a beautiful bag woven of love and care and beauty; the handwork is mine, Shefa’s, my family’s, our beloved community’s. I fiddle with it daily to make it more ergonomic, easier to carry, more comprehensible.

But as beautiful and ergonomic as the bag is – so comfortable that sometimes, for a moment, I even forget that I am carrying it – when I open it, there are the raw edges of my broken heart. Maybe I’m wrong and they will heal, or soften over time. But for now, when I touch them, I flood with pain.

*****

And still: At the end of every thought and feeling of my grief is gratitude. Not for what caused the grief, never for that. Not for the perspective pain has brought me, though I am grateful for that as well. But for the love that carried me through. Literally carried me, for weeks, months, still even now, for the love that will carry me for the rest of my life and perhaps beyond, for the love that has come through thousands of acts. Some of them undeniable miracles, some of them deep and long acts of love and commitment, some of them simply small momentary acts of goodness, of reaching out, of loved ones or acquaintances or perfect strangers showing up and tending to me, my family, and our broken hearts. Every single act has mattered. Every single act has been infinite in its impact.

My life no longer feels like it’s mine. Any last shreds of belief I had in the individual are gone. I know, so deeply, that we all belong to each other, and that our survival as a species depends on this.

And so, my heart is broken because of love. And I am alive because of love. I can never repay the love that has been given me, I don’t even have the capacity to adequately speak thanks for it, not even remotely. I can only share it with others, whenever I can, however I can, with whomever I can. And doing that, and learning to do it better and better, is reason enough to survive. And that is why I have.