Outside, the world lay in frozen silence. Snow-covered pines climbing toward peaks I couldn’t see in the darkness. A sky full of stars, more than I’d ever seen in Texas, scattered across the black like someone had spilled milky glitter.
I wasn’t making mental to-do lists. Wasn’t stressing about wrapping paper or the broken angel ornament or the disaster zone of a kitchen. Wasn’t cataloging everything that needed to happen for the move, like finding a realtor, sorting through three decades of accumulated stuff, coordinating with the movers, finding a cardiologist, updating my address with approximately eight thousand different organizations and institutions.
For the first time in longer than I could remember, I was here.Present in the moment, in this chair, with this man. Not five steps ahead or ten years in the past. Just here.
Someone once told me, in the fog of those first weeks after Levi died, that grief was just love with nowhere to go. At the time, I’d thought it was the most devastating thing I’d ever heard. All that love I had for my son, all those years of worry and hope and fear and joy—trapped inside me with no outlet, no destination, just endless circulation through a heart that didn’t know how to let go.
I’d thought about it constantly after the divorce, wondering where I was supposed to store over three decades of love for a man who no longer shared my bed or my life. Where did love go when the person was still alive but no longer yours? Did it dissipate like smoke? Calcify into resentment? Transform into something else entirely?
It had taken me a long time, but I thought I finally understood what that well-meaning stranger had meant.
Grief was the price of love. It was the evidence that we once held something so profound and meaningful that it irrevocably changed our lives. You didn’t get over it or move past or heal from it, not really.
It just changed shape. Found cracks to hide in, showing up where you least expected. Like finding one of Levi’s socks under a couch cushion or seeing Skylar make the same face Teddy did when she was concentrating.
Just because it had nowhere to go didn’t mean it disappeared.
Because that was the thing about love.
It waited. Patient and stubborn, it endured every winter, every sleepless night, every moment you thought would break you beyond repair. It showed you that you could hold both enormous joy and enormous loss in the same heart without one canceling out the other.
And sometimes, if you were impossibly lucky, all that love found its way home again.
“Merry Christmas, Kels,” Teddy whispered, brushing a tear from my lashes.
“Merry Christmas, Teddy,” I whispered before kissing the man who’d been my everything and my nothing and all the points between. Who’d given me three beautiful children and more pain than I’dthought survivable. Who’d loved me every way a person could—good and bad.
For the first time since losing Levi—maybe the first time ever—I let myself believe in a future again.
Not a perfect one. Not the carefully curated version I would have planned once upon a time, with contingency protocols and the desperate illusion of control that had destroyed us before. But a real one. Messy and uncertain and full of all the beautiful, terrible, ordinary moments that made up a life.
When Teddy’s hand found mine in the darkness, squeezing gently, I squeezed back.
Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good life…
The End
