The First Year Without Her

The first year without her was the longest year of my life. Every milestone — her birthday, our anniversary, Christmas — was a fresh wound.\n\nHer birthday was the hardest. She would have been thirty-nine. I bought a cake and sat alone in the dark, eating it slice by slice, talking to her like she could hear me.\n\n"I don't know how to do this," I told the empty room.\n\nThe first spring without her, the garden bloomed. She had planted tulips the fall before she died. When the red and yellow flowers pushed through the soil, I stood in the backyard and sobbed.\n\nA friend gave me a book about grief. It said that grief is just love with nowhere to go. I didn't understand it at first. But as the months passed, I started to.\n\nMy love for her didn't die when she did. It transformed. It became the ache in my chest when I remembered her smile. It became the warmth I felt when I told stories about her.\n\nIt's been five years now. I still miss her every day. But the grief has become something I can carry. It's heavy, but it's also precious — because it means she was here. It means she mattered.