The opposite of grief is forgetting.

Grief.

With all the time on my hands I’ve come to believe that the opposite of grief is forgetting. Why grief, because I lost someone that is never coming back. And as much as knowing this the pain hurts, I thought I could forget, I do not think that anymore. I don’t think forgetting is what any of us really want. When someone has meant that much to us, when they have been part of our life, our laughter, our family, our story—we don’t want to erase that just because remembering hurts.

Ive come to the conclusion that maybe grief isn’t something we are supposed to get over.

Maybe we don’t get over it.

Maybe we don’t even get through it.

Maybe we simply learn how to walk with it.

I still carry scares from when I was a child playing in the streets. Those are long healed but I still remember the day it hurt the most.

There will be days when grief walks quietly beside us, and there will be days when it feels so heavy that carrying it seems impossible. A song, a smell, a photograph, a place, or even a simple thought can suddenly bring everything rushing back.

And sometimes those memories will make us cry.

And make us long for better days.

Sometimes they will make us smile.

Sometimes they will do both at the same time.

Because sometimes, you will never know the true value of a moment until it becomes a memory.

That is why I believe I must hold on to those memories. Hold on to the conversations. Hold on to the laughter. Hold on to the little moments that probably didn’t seem important when they were happening.

Because one day, those little moments can become some of the most valuable things I have left.

And as much as it hurts right now, I have to remind myself.

You’re going to be okay.

Not because you stopped missing them.

Not because you stopped loving them.

And certainly not because you forgot them.

You’re going to be okay because, little by little, you will learn how to carry both the love and the loss together.

You will heal, and it will leave a scare.

The pain may change with time,

but the love does not have to disappear with it.

So I don’t believe grief means that we are failing to heal.

I believe grief is simply proof that someone mattered.

Proof that they touched our life touched our very soul.

Proof that they left something behind in us that death, distance, or time cannot completely take away.

And maybe that is why grief hurts as deeply as it does.

Because grief is the price we pay for having had the privilege to love someone so deeply so intensely.

The love didn’t make us perfect, but it set a path to understand how to become that which loves so much. That grief will never leave us.