Let it Be.

It's cold tonight.

It's been cold for a few nights now.

And I wonder how seasons have gone - spring, summer and fall - and now we are back to the chill of when you died.

How has time gone so fast, yet felt like an eternity, and it is once again that damp cold that chills your bones?

Tonight I was driving home from hockey when "Let it Be" came on.

"And when the broken hearted people living in the world agree..."

I think we can all agree that time is fleeting.

That no matter what we do it ticks along, it flies, and it takes us with it.

"There will be an answer, let it be..."

An answer.

I don't think there will ever be an answer to the infinite questions I keep asking, over and over.

Why?

How?

Why you?

Why us?

Why this?

"For though they may be parted, there is still a chance that they will see..."

Do you see?

Do you see how everything is moving along, the progress, the back steps, the things that have happened since you were taken?

Do you see me here now, alone, just trying to keep going like I know you would want me to?

Do you see the things I wonder about, the answers I don't have, the life we had planned snuffed out and the world somehow carrying on in its twisted way?

Do you see I am trying?

"There will be an answer, let it be..."

I wish there was an answer.

I wish my dreams weren't as upside down as they are, some where you are alive but we cannot see each other, others where things are as they were and the darkness has not set in.

"And when the night is cloudy there is still a light that shines on me..."

I keep trying to find that light.

I keep hoping there is something at the end of this tunnel - okay, "end" is not the right word since there will never be an end to this, despite the end to you here - but I keep trying to push toward something, anything.

It's just so damn hard without you here.

By now we would have been settling into our new house, yet here I am, settling into my house, without you.

And that just feels so damn wrong.

Stan is here.

I know we had said no more dogs but in some way I believe you sent him because you had always told me you knew how beagles healed my hurting heart.

I know you sent him and I thank you.

And I know you send the butterflies - the white butterflies that flutter outside the patio every morning when I have my coffee, every time Sheena and I are at the camper lighting a fire, every time I go to my car to go to work.

I know you send them.

Thank you.

"I wake up to the sound of music, Mother Mary comes to me..."

And I dreamed about my nan last night. Mother Mary. She and I were "fishing" on the hills like we did with my pop's bamboo poles (the "ponds" were craters of rocks that had settled after glaciers, and she told me the history of that). We fished and we talked and we walked.

And in the end I went back to my home on the hill and she left me, heart filled, with her usual quip of, "Nan's girl."

I hadn't dreamed of nan Street for so long.

I feel like my dreams are all over the place these days but nearly all have you in them. We are doing mundane things, living our mundane life together and I remember how good that mundane life felt.

I miss it so.

And yet something always happens in those dreams and you go away, I can't see you, but you always reassure me:

"Whisper words of wisdom, let it be..."

I'm trying, Brad.

I'm trying to let it all be now.

I'm trying to push forward into work and life and everything that now has to be done without you.

I am trying to push through the hurt, the immensurable amount of hurt from your loss and also what has come tied to that - the realization that there are no lengths others will not go to project hurt and to try and beat you down to make themselves feel good and righteous.

And, if that is what it takes to make them feel good in their silo, who am I to judge?

Who am I to expose that?

That has never been me.

I will always write from the heart and should that evoke negative emotions based on the actions of others that is not my burden to carry, nor am I responsible for the bridges I did not burn.

I hope, some day, in his own time, he looks for me and he knows how much he meant to me because he was your world too.

But, for now, here I am.

Christmas is coming.

You hated Christmas and we spoke these past couple of years about how maybe you should try to find joy in it for him. He is getting older and these are the memories he will have.

So we tried - wrapping the artwork as presents, you bringing that damn elf home, us just trying to make Christmas a little more enjoyable.

I hope it was.

I looked forward to our first Christmas in our new home - mom and dad spending it with us in town for the first time, our tree decorated in the window in that yellow house.

I won't be putting up a tree this year - I just can't.

And the thought of my first Christmas without you makes my chest so tight I wonder if a breath will fit.

But it will just be another thing I have to push through without you.

No Christmas parties and planning our outfits a month before, no new dresses, shirts and shoes. 

No Christmas.

"Let it be,
Let it be,
Let it be,
Let it be..."

I am trying to let it be but I hate what it has become.

And this life is not one I want nor the one I need.

But it is the one I have now and I guess that is that, really.

An outlier.

I miss our little family.

I miss Christmas shopping for everyone.

I miss...you.

But right now I have to take things day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute, breath by breath.

And even none of that feels like the pathway through this.

I just. Don't. Know.

But, for now, I guess I have to listen to the lesson:

"Let it be..."

So I will.

But no part of me knows how to be without you.

And that might be the biggest lesson of this year at all.

32 weeks without you now.

32 weeks when I hadn't thought I could live beyond one.

Back then I wondered what it would look like now.

And it looks like this - pain, grief, tears, a brave face to get through work, hours on the ice, walks along the streets with Stan and tears in his fur as he learns about you.

That is what 32 weeks look like.

They look a hell of a lot like the others prior.

And my heart holds a weight that it cannot.

I guess the only thing I can do is keep moving forward.

"Shining on until tomorrow..."

Tomorrow will be here before I know it.

32 weeks and one day then.

And I just have no choice.

"Let it be..."