The difference, according to me, of grieving and just remembering.

Confronting death on a personal level means confronting life and mortality on that level as well. They say there are many stages of grief but I don't know what stages there are when you don't grieve but you just remember what isn't there any more. The two are not the same by miles. 

This is sort of related to my Mom's death, of course, but it is really related to so much more. Her death made me sad but it didn't make me mournful or depressed. It created many pockets of memories that appear now and then, but I think that's rather normal. But there is no grief.

There was a book review in the New York Times last week, the book I cannot remember but I wrote this down, written by the person who reviewed the book, and I am dismayed I cannot remember her name either. But here is the quote: "Grief is the final act of love, and recovery from it is the necessary betrayal on which the future depends. There is only this one life and we are the ones who are here to live it."  This resonated with me. I thought about it for a while and realized that the only person I have ever lost that I grieved for was Martha Meade, my excellent friend who was killed 5 years ago. Her death was sudden and terrible and it left a gaping wound to my heart and my mind and my psyche. I grieved for Martha but as the quote above says, the lessening of the grief, while it sometimes felt wrong, was necessary because life did have to go on, the future was dependent on trying to put the grief away.  The loss never goes away but the gaping wound does begin to heal.

There are more deaths to come, of course, none that I want to imagine or consider. There will be grief and more wounds but I am glad my Mom's death wasn't a terrible loss to me. It was her time.